Kim Kardashian’s 40th birthday bash: tone-deaf or a hilarious distraction?

Katie Rosseinsky: People don’t follow stars for realism

Even before she became the most famous woman on the planet, Kim Kardashian was always one for tone-deaf displays of flagrant wealth. It’s part of the larger-than-life personal brand that’s made her infamous — remember that endlessly memed Keeping Up With The Kardashians moment where her sister Kourtney has to remind her that “there’s people that are dying” as she hysterically weeps over a pair of lost diamond earrings?

Kim’s lifestyle has always been worlds away from that of us mere mortals — take today’s hologram birthday present from Kanye, featuring her late father. It would be silly to expect her to play by our rules now, and naturally her latest gesture is classic Kardashian. Crank up the online outrage machine if you will — but I’d rather save my indignation for something actually important.

Covid has thrown economic disparities into sharp relief, and it’s certainly a little galling to see Kim and co living it up pre-pandemic style as so many continue to have their lives upended. But people don’t follow celebrities for their relatability, or a jolt of gritty social realism. We keep up with the Kardashians because they give us a slice of heavily-filtered escapism. This is a family, after all, that dishes out Birkin bags as second birthday presents; whose children play in Wendy houses with square footage rivalling that of the average London house share. Their every move is part of a cartoonish, larger-than-life soap opera.

Lockdown has left us starved of proper celebrity gossip (just look at the downright hysterical response to those pictures of Dominic West and Lily James earlier this month for proof). Pillorying stars for their missteps — a trend which kicked off with Gal Gadot’s admittedly awful all-star cover of Imagine and continued with the outrage over Madonna’s baffling Instagram pronouncements — hasn’t helped fill the void, it’s just made us wallow in pandemic-induced anger and frustration.

With fun in short supply, we’re much better off seeing Kim’s spectacular lack of self-awareness as a hilarious distraction. Indeed, the memes skewering her birthday post created a brief moment of respite in our endless doom-scrolling.

Plus, the past decade of the Kardashian ascendancy has taught us that Kim — or at least her momager/puppetmaster Kris Jenner — is an astute businesswoman.

She’s well versed in social media outrage — angry tweets and Insta controversies don’t dent her brand, they only serve to inflate it. If you’re getting offended, you’re just playing into her hands.

Jessie Thompson: I’ll never look at celebrity holiday snaps again

Fair play to Kim Kardashian, very rich famous person. She wanted to celebrate her 40th birthday on a private island with her friends and family in the middle of a pandemic — her tweets about the lavish celebrations duly went viral. That’s no biggie when you’re worth $900 million and your inner circle don’t mind being subjected to two weeks of multiple health screens with no explanation. I’d do the same for my 30th next month if I could, but instead I’ve invited five friends to my garden to stand socially distanced around a fire in a bin, drinking tinnies.

My question is: did we really need to know about it? Did we really need to *see* the pictures of Kim and her crew in the ocean, or know that they “danced, rode bikes, swam near whales, kayaked” etc? In real life Covid rages on, countries around Europe teeter on the edge of another lockdown and, to add insult to injury, it’s started to get dark by 5pm.  Kardashian’s, unsurprisingly, been swamped with mockery online.

Not only has her jolly inspired this year’s most annoying viral meme — yes, worse than the “how it started, how it’s going” humble brag — but it’s scorched the fire-tested theory that celebrities seem to believe that, if we can’t see them, they don’t exist. They’re in a full-blown existential crisis, fearing their own obsolescence more than the mastermind of the VHS.

They also appear to be under the impression that simply allowing us to see them is somehow good for the world’s morale. Case in point: Gal Gadot and pals singing John Lennon badly. Madonna calling Covid “the great equaliser” while in a bath of rose petals. J-Lo posting a video of her house without realising she lives in the house from Parasite. All in fact very, very bad for  our morale.

In many ways it’s strangely thrilling to watch celebrities become that person who always puts their foot in their mouth at the worst possible moment. But, when so many around the world are struggling, all this flaunting of excessive wealth is starting to leave a bad taste. Believe me, as a shameless lover of silliness and gossip (Dominic West’s handwritten note is burned on my retinas), I’m sad to say it but, after this year, I’d gladly never look at the holiday snaps or home interiors of a celebrity ever again.

Kardashian wanted to “pretend things were normal just for a brief moment in time”, and so do we, but in the UK alone, unemployment is at its highest since records began. Schools around the country are stumping up to pay for school meals after the Government voted against providing them in the holidays and families don’t even know if they will be able to spend Christmas together. This is what’s really keeping people up at night.

There’s so much that we’ll want to leave behind from 2020. Celebrities, I’m sorry, you might have to go as  well.

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