Show and Tell!

The Kardashianisation of style is about fame, flamboyance and flaws propped up against existentialist realities. It is, perhaps,  culturally unsuited to India where the deepest and most intimate revelations are still at a nascent stage.

- Shefalee Vasudev

Lucrative as a performance art and entertaining as a spectator sport, the game of show and tell is symptomatic of our times. More so this year when privacy got royally damned. US President Donald Trump’s Twitter-trigger presidency, Lady Diana’s personal disillusionments turned into public chronicles to memorialise 20 years of her passing, the mythically ideal ex-couple Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt‘breaking their silence’ on their marital split or Indian actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui having to withdraw his memoir An Ordinary Life within days of its release because he hadn’t considered seeking the consent of the women he had intimately described; these are different expressions of similar compulsions. Compulsions that have been polished to professional perfection by those whose name combos include Kardashian, Jenner and West.

The bevy of the cool-hot, attention seeking K girls — Kim, Kylie, Kendall, Khloe, Kourtney — who wear controversy like couture; their diversity-chasing parents, their babies, butts, boyfriends,brands, bodyguards and spouses have been living a very (weary?) public life for a while now. They have aced publicity stunts, amassing millions of social media followers with image magnetism and manipulation. According to Forbes, Kim Kardarshian alone makes 300,000 dollars per sponsored post on Instagram. Even three years after an erotically oiled Kim balancing a champagne goblet on her buttbroke the internet with a Paper magazine cover that nominated the Desirable Derriere as a worthy peer of The Big Boob, the collective and individual lives of K Inc roll with roaring success. Out there for the world to like, loathe or lash out at.