Kim Kardashian West

Reality TV altered reality.

- Jonathan Van Meter

Exactly one month after Keeping Up With the Kardashians wrapped its first season on E!, Senator Barack Obama won the Iowa caucuses. Both would become juggernauts, setting the tone for much of the coming decade. Kim Kardashian West, the show’s star, not only understood the changes that were just beginning to disrupt much of the culture; she herself demonstrably shifted it, altering the way we understand fame and even the internet. And by filtering her own very particular reality through technology, she utterly changed the beauty business and also our idea of what a mogul is. Meanwhile, the Kardashian-Jenners presented a fascinating version of the modern blended American family, one that started conversations about everything from trans rights to mental health to addiction to cultural appropriation at what seemed like every dinner table in America. When I visited her at the minimalist palace she shares with her husband, Kanye West, and their four children in the gated community of Hidden Hills in Calabasas, California, there was a small army of men out front wrapping thousands of tiny white Christmas lights around trees lining the driveway. Inside the front door, I took off my shoes and padded along the endless hallway to the kitchen, where I found Kardashian West, dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, seated in the breakfast nook and drinking a glass mug of milky coffee. The island in the kitchen was resplendent with still-hanging-on floral arrangements sent for her birthday, October 21.

Did you just turn 40?

Not yet. I was born in 1980, so my decades are always so easy for me.

I never look at it politically. I don’t look at it like, “The Obama years are the 2010s.”