Polly Vernon
KIM KARDASHIAN WEST’S casting of Alice Marie Johnson in the campaign for her new shapewear brand Skims is, by my calculation, the most sublimely, preposterously Kim Kardashian West manoeuvre of all time. On the one hand: how wonderful! Alice Marie Johnson is the woman whose 2018 release from a life-plus-25-years jail sentence – on first-time, non-violent drug charges – Kim Kardashian West guaranteed. KKW went to bat for a woman she’d never met, hiring lawyers and taking a trip to the White House to secure Trump’s signature on the pardon. ‘She went to war for me,’ said Johnson; and golly! She did, didn’t she? Like Boudica in body-con, she was!
On the other hand: making an ad campaign of one’s most noble, selfless act, somewhat dents the original nobility, no? It’s like: seriously! Can Kim – can any Kardashian, for that matter – so much as fart without scoping the moment for commercial potential? Although: is a woman who understands, and capitalises on, her own worth, necessarily a bad thing? Never mind that this campaign will give Johnson financial options, money and opportunities – all of which are in short supply to ex-cons. But… but… It’s shapewear Johnson promotes for Kim! Shapewear! That most tricksie of propositions, feministically speaking, because: it binds! It restricts! It crushes, it cramps, it curtails, and it does all that in the name of the wearer looking more alluring in the eyes of some dude! Unless… it actually frees us – with confidence? Johnson says it does, drawing parallels between her liberation from prison and the liberation of the sculpting bodysuit she wears as she speaks (so passionately! So authentically! So compellingly!) in the ad… Ah, but is that just foully disingenuous on the part of brand mastermind Kardashian West? A jarring, bizarre conflation of the correcting of a great injustice – and flab-correcting pants?
But Alice Marie Johnson is 64 years old and African American! Using her and her story to cynical dollar-spinning ends is a subversive act: an expanding of definitions of desirability via commercial viability, a recaliberation of the world’s visuals, its humanity! Only… Oops. Remember when Kim called the range ‘Kimono’, then got nobbled for cultural appropriation? And so on.
I’ll never get to the moral bottom of this one; and nor will you, so don’t try. Like everything Kim Kardashian West does, it seems both incredibly good for women – and incredibly bad. A stick with which to beat us, and a manifesto by which we could feasibly lead better lives. I have no idea if we’ll ever know for sure which way she falls. Where, when or how it’ll end. I only know for sure I wouldn’t mind a go wearing that sculpting bodysuit.