Dear Gossips,
Yesterday in this space I wrote about the September Issue and the choices that major publications that are still able to put out print versions have made this year. American Vogue went with Blake Lively; ELLE went with Lisa; and British Vogue has gone with Kylie Jenner.
Right off the top it’s acknowledged that this would be a polarising decision, as it always is whenever a Kardashian-Jenner is involved in anything. And a lot of this is discussed in the piece which predicts the reaction to the piece; immediately on social media the comments started about how Kylie looks, whether or not she looks her age, etc etc etc. In the interview, she herself talks about the effect that being at once celebrated and dragged and glorified and picked over has had on her self-development.
If you’ve been visiting this site over the last two decades (!) you know that I’ve never been deeply engaged in the Kardashian-Jenner phenomenon. In the early years I tried to pretend it wasn’t happening, and then eventually realised that was a futile effort. This resulted in grudging acceptance of the fact that they have shaped pop culture to the point where if you want to understand pop culture, which I do, because it’s my job, you must acknowledge that they are inextricable from it. What they have done, led by Kris Jenner, is f-cking genius. And part of that genius is the fact that they have multi-generational powers.
Which brings us back to Kylie. It was my colleague, Michael, who fully brought it home for me this morning when we were talking about this British Vogue profile. Kylie is now 27 years old, around the same age as Michael. He and his friends grew up with her, were informed by her… on social media. Not the TV show, Keeping Up With The Kardashians, where Kourtney, Kim, and Khloe were the first wave. The three older sisters were connecting to their generation, but while Kylie was more of a background presence in the early era of KUWTK, she came to the foreground on Instagram. As a pre-teen and then a teenager and she’s the one who people of around the same age gravitated towards as they were navigating their own self-expression on the same platform. They might not still be riding for her now, but they also can’t look away. For this particular cohort, she is … defining. Maybe even iconic.
So the fact that she’s the first of her family to cover British Vogue, I mean the justification is there, whether you like it or not. If you can believe it (I had a hard time believing it), next year will mark the tenth anniversary of the Kylie Lip Kit, the product(s) that made her a mogul at the age of 18. That’s a whole ass decade of major influence in the beauty market and millions of beauty consumers, literally.
Interestingly enough, Kylie Cosmetics has peaked. Sales have been declining steadily over the last two years and there are a number of reasons: a saturated landscape and fractured attention spans, economic factors, shifts in consumer behaviours, etc etc etc. So Kylie’s new focus is clothing, in tandem with beauty. The Vogue piece goes hard on her fashion week presence, with cameos from major designers like Haide Ackermann and Daniel Roseberry in support of the idea that she is a fashion girly with her own distinct style. I’ve always said that I don’t find Kylie’s looks all that memorable, that she looks the same from one look to the next. Still, in the context of what I just discussed above, I’m not the demo. The 20-somethings out there rate her style much higher than I do.
So I’m curious to see where Kylie is headed with this push to fashion, with her own line, Khy, and the potential impact she might have on the actual runway, if any. Predicting anything related to the Kardashian-Jenners is a losing game for me, but I’d love to hear your thoughts. Head over to The Squawk and let me know. (app link here)
Click here for more of Kylie Jenner in British Vogue.
Yours in gossip,
Lainey
