Let them eat bling: Kim is new Antoinette
WHEN Kanye West described Kim Kardashian as “our modern-day Marie Antoinette ”, it seemed an off-the-wall remark. Speaking a few months back, West was referring to the way his wife was “photographed so much”, and how “she gets hair and make-up every day ... because every day is a photoshoot”. But judging by the schadenfreude provoked by last week’s robbery, in which the reality TV star was held at gunpoint by armed thieves who took £9 million of her jewellery, that is the role that Kardashian is increasingly occupying in our culture. The feelings she brings up around wealth inequality, the envy, the lack of sympathy many feel for her suffering and violation, the way she has become a symbol of conspicuous consumption – bring to mind the French queen guillotined in the name of the French revolution.
“In modern usage,” wrote Barbara Amiel in The Telegraph, “the name Marie Antoinette has become the negative sobriquet of the female consumer gone mad, or the woman too big for her many shoes.” Both Kardashian and the French queen have served as symbols and scapegoats for our feelings about inequality.
The news that Kardashian had experienced a frightening robbery was greeted by a disturbing stream of responses which appeared to suggest that she deserved it. The right thing to feel is sympathy – the star had been terrifyingly bound and gagged. But I have to confess that like many I experienced a remarkable absence of it. That’s not because I feel, as some appeared to, that she’s posed naked on the cover of a magazine and tweeted nude selfies, therefore she had it coming. Absolutely not. But every photograph of her stolen £3.3m ring, every story about her personal £33m wealth, eroded my empathy capacity. This schadenfreude was quickly followed by a wave of moralising: celebrities and commentators complaining of victim-blaming, or saying, as James Corden did, that one should feel sympathy because she’s “a wife, a mother, a sister” (itself, surely a politically incorrect statement, since it reduces the woman to her roles with regard to others). To me, these complicated responses to Kardashian’s plight are not straightforward victim-blaming, but an inevitable by-product of a society in which there is extreme inequality and an unjust wealth gap between the richest and poorest. We see such affluence, and it acts as a barrier between the rich and us. Kardashian may be, as her fans say, “relatable” on many levels, but her millions make her not so. Economists Curtis Eaton and Mukesh Eswaran, who have researched the economics of conspicuous consumption, argue that goods like lavish jewellery and luxury cars “represent a ‘zero-sum game’ for society: they satisfy the owners, making them appear wealthy, but everyone else is left feeling worse off”. They describe how the pursuit of status symbols leads people to have less time or inclination for helping others and damage “community and trust”. As Eaton and Eswaran have put it: “Conspicuous consumption can have an impact not only on people’s well-being but also on the growth prospects of the economy.” Conspicuous consumption these days is practised more by the formerly less wealthy than those that really have the monopoly on wealth – hence, in part, the bling of the rapper. That Kim Kardashian, though just one minor player in society’s rich list, is so happy to flaunt her diamonds on social media is what marks her out as both an incomer to such wealth, but also as an icon of consumption.
There are many others much richer, but Kardashian is one we know; she is visible and reachable. She’s also a woman – and it’s nothing new that the female sex, as in Marie Antoinette’s time, should be the focus of our blame and difficult feelings. It was not, after all, Louis XVI, the French king whose policies would lead to food scarcity and revolt, who was named “Madame Deficit” and blamed for the country’s financial crisis, but his queen, Marie Antoinette. It’s she who has gone down in history for the words she never actually said: “Let them eat cake.”
Women, because they are more visible in their sporting of such extravagant symbols, are more likely to be the focus of anger over inequality, or fury over what their apparent trivial excesses. Hence Imelda Marcos’s 3,000 shoes are the symbol of the corruption and brutality of her husband, Ferdinand Marcos’s regime.
Of course, Kardashian is a very different figure from Marie Antoinette, living in a very different age. She is self-made, an entrepreneur, seemingly the architect of her own life and brand. Yet though the gender roles have changed, the story is the same. While we could easily be talking about Donald Trump’s conspicuous consumption, or even that of Kanye West, or the buyer of the £3.3m ring, the person we direct our resentment at is the woman.