Kim Kardashian’s 2024 Met Gala ensemble featured a sheer, silver dress with sparkling drapes and an asymmetrical gray knit shawl. The goal was to elongate her waist to resemble a pencil. Is that what’s upsetting you? That was most likely the intention.
That appears to be the case, at least right now. Kardashian has become well-known at fashion’s most important event in recent years, but not because she expertly pulled off a red-carpet moment meant to highlight an enduring work of wearable art.
Rather, Kim Kardashian has made a career out of stirring up controversy by demonstrating to the public that she can bend her body in ways that most regular people cannot fit into gowns. She practically guarantees weeks of online discussion by doing this.
It hasn’t always been this way. Before her partnership with Kanye West, there wasn’t a world in which any Kim Kardashian would have walked the Met Gala red carpet. Many swore that if she and her sisters ever attended, their inclusion as hoi polloi reality stars, not real celebrities, would mark the end of the event’s prestige as we know it (in fact, in 2012 Page Six reported a still-unconfirmed rumor that Anna Wintour herself had banned Kardashian from attending).
When Kardashian finally did make her debut, she did so in 2013 as the date of her then-partner and fashion insider West, pregnant with their first child, no less. She later admitted she was so nervous and sure that no one “wanted her there” that she cried after the event. At the time her tight floral Givenchy dress and gloves ensemble was unusual—and created memes we’re still seeing—but it wasn’t designed to shock.
In the decade since Kardashian and her sisters have all attended many times and are now considered Met Gala staples. However, in the past few years, it seems that Kardashian is less focused on fashion and more focused on the all-consuming need to ensure that we all talk (and talk and talk) about her seemingly nonhuman body.
This started in 2022 with the Marilyn Monroe dress debacle, when Kardashian appeared on the carpet in Monroe’s “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” gown. If you remember, fashion lovers and historians were outraged that Kardashian was allowed to wear the dress at all, especially when it was rumored that she had damaged it in the process (the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum, which owned the dress, later denied).
Many were disturbed by Kardashian’s casual admission of the drastic measures she took to fit into the dress, mainly that she essentially didn’t eat for three weeks.
“I would wear a sauna suit twice a day, run on the treadmill, completely cut out all sugar and all carbs, and just eat the cleanest veggies and protein,” she told Vogue. “I didn’t starve myself, but I was so strict.”
As we wrote at the time, Kardashian’s promotion of such an extreme crash diet was “both alarming and outdated,” and many people were justifiably up in arms about it. It was all anyone talked about for weeks after the gala, and the instance was among the first to spark the Ozempic discourse, as the drug was relatively unknown to the masses in 2022. She was, for better or for worse, the Met’s main character.
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That’s why when I first saw Kardashian’s outfit on the red carpet last night that teeny-tiny waist, I had to roll my eyes. Are we doing this again? It just seems so obvious and tired at this point. Her midsection was crammed into such a ridiculous corset that many joked that it looked like she had her ribs removed. Other commenters on social media noted how physically miserable she looked, wondered if her organs got crushed, and said it looked as though she was crying tears of pain on the red carpet.
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We could get mad at her for, once again, showing us an unrealistic and harmful standard of body modification and thinspo. We could debate what it means that she can have the smallest waist in modern history. But I don’t even want to go there.
Why? Because it’s boring at this point. The Kardashian bread and butter is causing scandal and gossip, often at the expense of making women feel bad about the way they look, and it’s frankly stale. We’ve been down this road before, and it’s not even about how she looks anyway. It’s all about the drama and the story, and it’s useless to participate.
Besides, there are so many more interesting things to talk about at the Met. Like Sabrina and Barry! Zendaya! Tyla’s cool sand dress! Even Doja Cat in a towel is more exciting.
Debating whether or not Kim Kardashian is too skinny is a snooze. Especially when we know that it’s all manufactured for us to do just that. So Kim Kardashian Met Gala 2024 look is one celebrity gossip narrative that I very much would like to be excluded from.
Stephanie McNeal is a senior editor at Glamour and the author of Swipe Up for More! Inside the Unfiltered Lives of Influencers.
