Standing in the airy kitchen of her Calabasas home, Kim Kardashian West looks like she might be the twentysomething nanny or assistant of Kim Kardashian West. Without her signature chassis of bronzer, highlighter, contouring, and skintight Yeezy garb, the 37-year-old is almost indistinguishable from the handful of staff in the room, even to someone who has absorbed probably 300 GB of her selfies. In a long-sleeve cotton shirt and athletic pants, and with her hair in cornrows (more on that later), she is softer, daintier, in three dimensions than she is in two. I shouldn’t be surprised. If anything is true of Kim, it is her endless talent for optical illusions.
“Thank you for coming all the way out here,” she says politely. “I hope there wasn’t too much traffic on a Saturday.” She leads the way to a living room containing a movie screen and a cream linen couch that could comfortably seat 10. In a house full of kids (three now), the sofa is improbably spotless. But what’s more remarkable is how silent the place is. “Everyone says that!” she says, kicking off her black Balenciaga slides and curling up in a corner. “My kids just aren’t that loud. My daughter has a friend over; they’re in the playroom. But they’re outdoorsy. My dog’s even quiet; it’s the craziest thing.” She’s referring, of course, to Sushi, the Pomeranian whose yapping was a story line on last season’s Keeping Up With the Kardashians. The Sushi problem was solved by a session with the Dog Whisperer, Cesar Millan, and they all lived happily ever after.
An employee brings a tray with a glass mug of black tea sweetened with coconut milk. It’s the precise color of Kim’s skin, which is clearly an accident, but that I wonder about it tells you something about Kim’s maestro-like control over her surroundings. Her staff is dressed in head-to-toe black, with no logos or patterns on their clothing. In fact, there doesn’t appear to be any branding whatsoever on the premises. Even the water bottle Kim offers me has its sleeve carefully peeled off. “It’s a label-less house,” she says, gesturing around the room, which is indeed composed of Rothko-esque color fields in beige and greige.
The most obvious explanation for the lack of commercial noise is that her home doubles as a film set. And as is the case in movies and scripted series, reality TV requires the “Greeking”—blacking out or blurring—of logos in order to avoid trademark infringement. Also, if you’re a Kardashian, a clearly marked product in your house (or hand) is as good as an ad. And ads come with a price tag.
But Kim maintains that she’s simply a neat freak. “My life is chaotic, so my home is supersimple. Everything has to be clean. No clutter.” This maxim extends to her digital life as well. “I can’t have a full phone. At the end of the day, I delete everything that’s not a current conversation. If I need some information, then I keep it. If not, it has to be deleted. I can’t see too much noise.” A preference for visual serenity is part of Kim and Kanye’s aesthetic kinship. “If Kanye had a dream project,” she says, “it would be to make a Yeezy product line—like deodorant, every product you could imagine. He would redo them all; he hates how they look.” It’s easy to picture: Yeezy x Walgreens, all monotone items for your medicine cabinet.
On the topic of organization, Kim becomes emphatic. “If things aren’t organized, I flip out. My kids’ clothes have their name ironed into them on little labels. I know where everything is, and I. Do. Not. Lose. Things,” she asserts. The one exception to her tidiness doctrine: The kids’ playroom is a zone of chaos, with paints and toys and a notable absence of zillion-dollar furniture. It’s the realm of North (aka Northy-Lou), Saint (aka Sainty-Boo), and Chicago West (Chi), who is only 12 days old. Chicago is Kim and Kanye’s biological child; a doctor recommended the two use a gestational carrier after Kim suffered from placenta accreta during both deliveries. The gritty details: “After giving birth, your placenta is supposed to come out. But mine was stuck. That’s what women usually die from in childbirth—you hemorrhage and bleed to death and they can’t stop it. To get it out—it’s so disgusting—the doctor had to stick his whole arm in me and scrape it off. It was the most painful.” Her mom, Kris Jenner, was in the room the first time. “To this day, if you mention it to her, she’ll cry. It was traumatic.”
With the delivery of a third child out of the question, the couple turned to surrogacy. Although Kim admits that’s not the right term: “I refer to her as a surrogate, but it’s completely my and Kanye’s DNA, so technically that’s called a gestational carrier. A surrogate is when they use the husband’s sperm and the surrogate’s egg.” The couple worked with agencies to locate candidates, whom they then interviewed. When Kim found their woman, she knew immediately. “It was a feeling,” she says. “You know when you can trust someone.” The next step was to select an embryo. “It’s a really tricky thing,” she says. “What sex do you put in? I just said, ‘Which one is the healthiest? Pick the healthiest one,’ and that was a girl.” Once the process was underway, she only had a few requests: that the baby be born in L.A., “where all my babies were delivered, and for her to use my doctor. She was totally comfortable with that.” Kim also preferred that the carrier eat as organically as possible, “which is just how she eats, so it was a good match for us.” But she wasn’t tyrannical about it. “I straight-up told her, ‘Look, I ate doughnuts every single day. If you want doughnuts and ice cream, go for it. Do whatever you feel. I’m not going to be picky like that. That’s just ridiculous.’” The two attended doctor’s appointments together and kept in close touch. “I hated being pregnant,” Kim says. “But as much as I hated it, I still wished I could have done it on my own. The control is hard at the beginning. Once you let that go, it’s the best experience. I would recommend surrogacy for anybody.”
So will she do it all over again? “I dunno,” she sighs. “My home and my heart feel really full right now, in the best way.” Four children would be her max. “I don’t think I could handle more than that. My time is spread really thin. And I think it’s important that in all couples, the mom gives the husband as much attention as the kids.” On the marriage front, she says all is well. As the Kardashian West family grows, so too does her relationship with Kanye. “He’s taught me to have more of an opinion,” she says. “I’ve taught him to be a bit more calm or cautious. We’re a good balance.”
Scoring these reflections is the gentle clicking of white beads at the ends of Kim’s Fulani braids, which…sigh. The question of the cornrows requires us to step out of our interview time frame for a moment and fast-forward to the following night, when Kim Snapchats a video debuting her hair to the world. “Guys, I did Bo Derek braids and I’m really into it,” she said. (It was actually her second outing in “Bo Derek braids.” The first time was in 2013.) It was posted on the same night as the Grammys. That Kim and Kanye were not in attendance led to speculation that her spotlight grab was strategic. As discussions of cultural appropriation unrolled on Twitter, Kim doubled down, posting a series of Instagram photos, one captioned “Bo West,” another a picture featuring her on the phone: “Hi, can I get zero fucks please, thanks.” The move was met with chagrin. It was pointed out that Kim’s hairstyle did not originate with Bo Derek, a white woman born in 1956, but with black women thousands of years ago. And Kim was taken to task for borrowing liberally from black culture without exhibiting awareness that such filching belongs to a legacy of exploitation, or that it might have consequences beyond Instagram comments. Previous examples of the behavior were cited: Kim wearing cornrows in 2010; Kim dressing up as Aaliyah for Halloween last year and responding to the criticism by saying she doesn’t “see color.”
But on this sunny Saturday, Kim is simply enjoying her new hair, unconcerned with how it might be received. “I’m not worried, because I love Bo Derek,” she says. “It’s a reference. If you genuinely love something, then it’s what you should do. It’s appreciation.” That may be her belief. And perhaps you could make a case that Kim is, in fact, referencing someone else’s act of cultural appropriation and therefore subverting the error. But you could also make the case that she’s compounding it. The way she sees it, she’s just doing what feels right to her. “It’s one thing when people mock something and are negative. I’m clearly not being negative. Images mean a lot to me. I spend a lot of time on them.”
Which brings us to the thing about Kim Kardashian West. At this point in history, writing about her is like writing about the internet or sex or television. The topic is so vast and faceted that it approaches abstraction—and I don’t use the pronoun it here lightly, or with a molecule of derision. Because in addition to being a woman, Kim is an “it”: a vector of debate, a media property, a mover of markets, an engine of consumer behavior, a symbol, a brand, a cipher. If he were still alive, Andy Warhol would be obsessed with her. And as with Warhol, the meaning of Kim Kardashian West remains elusive even as her influence extends at an ever-increasing velocity.
Despite her assertion that “I don’t really like flashy material things anymore,” Kim’s landscape is one populated by diamonds, private jets, and rose bouquets larger than many studio apartments. It’s a cross-platform, finely tuned optics juggernaut that requires constant maintenance and, she insists justifiably, a lot of work. Her to-do lists regularly consist of photo and video editing, licensing, filming, updating her mobile gaming app, and general content production. Come March, she’ll debut a line of concealers as part of her KKW Beauty collection. “I’ve had the formulas for a while,” she says, but delayed their release by six months when the packaging wasn’t perfect.
Kim works from home “while the kids are napping” as much as possible. But effortlessness is not a part of her story. “I was never one of those people who were handed everything from their parents,” she says. Instead, she embodies the concept of the hustle, a word that implies both labor and glitz in a way that might seem contradictory but is in fact extremely American. “Even when I worked in my dad’s office, I was doing side eBay jobs on my lunch break. I lived a really great life growing up, but we were taught that if we wanted to keep that up, we had to work. At the end of the day, if someone offered me business or fame, I’d take the business side.”
Since Kim’s business is being herself, it follows that her self, that slippery concept, must contain a value proposition that appeals to millions. So what is that value? She doesn’t offer the spectacle of a conventional entertainer. She doesn’t make people laugh (like a comedian) or empathize (like an actor) or sing (like a musician) or think (like an artist). Her presence across multiple media is distinctly undemanding: What she asks is that you admire her, which is easy and enjoyable. It requires very little effort. All we have to do is behold her, appreciate her, and maybe wonder how she gets her eyelashes so feathery.
To her credit, Kim has never been coy about the discipline involved in maintaining this image. I ask her to quantify it—to break down the increments of time spent on sheer bodily upkeep. She lays it out: Hour-long workouts at 6 a.m. (Torture.) Hair and makeup for an hour every day. (Fun.) Manicures and pedicures every 10 days. Brows with Anastasia every three weeks. Teeth whitening, spray tans, laser hair removal, various stomach- and thigh-tightening lasers (although she’s cut back on those), daily skin and hair vitamins, plus the occasional marathon hair event, like the cornrows, which took six hours and kept her up until 2 a.m. Oh, and her eyelashes? They’re natural. She’s never done extensions, doesn’t need them. The Armenian side of her family took care of that.
There’s no question that the grueling upkeep routine is working. Kim is aging in the opposite of dog years: For every seven years, she ages one. But she’s focusing less on her look these days and even less on what people think of her. “At the beginning, I looked at people’s opinions. Now I’m content in my life, and I don’t care. The things that make me happy now are different. But I swear, you have to be born for this. It’s not for everyone. I know I can handle it.” Having a solid and ever-expanding support system helps. Every morning, she dips into the family group chat on her phone, which includes all her siblings plus Kris Jenner and, occasionally, Kris’s mother, MJ, who could tutor us all on social media literacy (she replies to her granddaughter’s selfies with the fire emoji). Kim’s entrepreneurial instincts may have launched her into a sphere of universal fame and dizzying wealth, but happiness, it turns out, is texting your grandmother.
Hair by Chris Appleton at the Wall Group and Andrew Fitzsimons at BA-Reps; makeup by Ariel Tejada; manicure by Tom Bachik; set design by Gille Mills; produced by Westy Productions LA
This article originally appeared in the April 2018 issue of ELLE.
