EMMA JOHNSON

FatFace Margot daisy patchwork dress £59.50, Tasha denim jacket £49.50, Jennifer crewneck £35

All clothes from

Fat Face, fatface.com

Emma Dappled Mark Make dress in duckegg £59.50

ANOTHER week, another Kardashian drama. Yes, Covid may have stopped a lot of things but not even a global pandemic is enough to halt the headlines about reality TV’s First Family.

This week it was Khloé klogging up the column inches after a picture of her appeared online.

So what, you might think. Barely an hour goes by when one of the women is not posting a perfectly filtered photo of themselves. But that was the problem. This was not a perfectly filtered image. It was a snapshot taken, we are told, by her grandmother.

Hey we’ve all been there with older relatives and access to the internet. You should see some of the childhood pics my mum has seen fit to share. The difference is, unlike Khloé, I don’t have a multi-million dollar brand, built upon a carefully styled image, to protect.

It was not the TV star’s grandma who posted the image but some assistant. What on earth they were thinking when they hit the ‘share’ button, we will never know. But I can guess what they were thinking once the post-publication firestorm erupted, and if I wrote it in this column it would require a lot of asterisks.

Within hours of the photo appearing, lawyers for the family were scrabbling to get it taken down. A legal representative for Khloe’s grandmother issued a statement, which read: “We are counsel for Mary Jo ‘MJ’ Shannon. Copies of a photograph, captured by our client, which captures her family member Khloé Kardashian in a private location (wearing a leopard print bikini), have been unlawfully posted online, without authorisation.”

In a separate statement Tracy Romulus, chief marketing officer for KKW Brands, added: “The colour edited photo was taken of Khloé during a private family gathering and posted to social media without permission by mistake by an assistant. Khloé looks beautiful but it is within the right of the copyright owner to not want an image not intended to be published taken down.”

It goes without saying that I cannot print the photo here, so allow me to describe it for you. It shows the 36-year-old mum-ofone standing by a pool in a leopard print bikini. She appears to be wearing little make-up, her body is fit and toned. It also looks how bodies look in natural light.

While I would rather no-one publish pictures of me in a bikini – I would prefer no-one took pictures of me in one – I think most of us would be delighted to look as good as Khloé does in the photo. It is certainly nothing like those unflattering images snapped of big sister Kim on a beach in Mexico some years ago.

It is, of course, beyond ironic that in rushing to get an image removed from public view, Khloé’s team drew more attention to it.

She addressed the own goal the only way her family knows how... via social media, releasing a series of videos and photos of herself which she insisted were not retouched or airbrushed.

In the posts that accompanied them she detailed her body image struggles and how wealth and privilege do not make you immune to the hurt caused by being called ‘the fat sister’ or the ‘ugly sister’, cruel jibes regularly aimed at her.

Fair enough. No-one deserves to be abused no matter how rich or famous they are.

Unsurprisingly, the saga has reignited the debate about the dangers of filtering and airbrushing and what sort of example celebrities set when they sell us a ‘fake’ ideal. That can only be a good thing.

I know I am concerned, and am getting more concerned with every unrealistic Instagram post I see, and I mean the ones from ‘civilians’ as much as the ones of celebrities, that we are irreparably damaging our collective psyche and self-esteem by constantly tuning how we look in photos (I recently learned to my horror that some people touch up how they look on Zoom calls!).

But surely the only people who believe that the Kardashian women look the way they do in their social media posts are the Kardashians themselves...

GLAM: Khloé Kardashian on the red carpet