Over the past two decades, this one family has shaped not just American but global culture – but how did they become so influential?
In this episode, we'll be telling the story of the Kardashians and their rise to fame, the influence they have on culture, and whether it is all about to come crumbling down.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about an American family, The Kardashians.
[00:00:27] Like them or loathe them, over the past two decades this one family has shaped not just American but global culture, changing the way people look, dress, and behave.
[00:00:41] So, in this episode we are going to tell their story: we’ll look at how they became famous, the influence they've had and continued to have on culture, and whether this is all about to come crumbling down.
[00:00:54] OK then, The Kardashians.
[00:00:59] The popular movie and TV series review site, IMDB.com, is usually a pretty good place to go to get an idea of whether a TV or movie is worth watching.
[00:01:11] The site collects reviews by professional film critics as well as regular people, you or I can review any film and leave a rating.
[00:01:22] The highest rated film on the website is Shawshank Redemption, which gets a rating of 9.3 from a total of 2.8 million viewers.
[00:01:33] And even films that are considered to be huge flops, commercial failures, don’t tend to get such terrible user ratings.
[00:01:43] John Carter, a 2012 film which lost an inflation-adjusted $250 million at the box office gets a 6.6/10, and The Lone Ranger, a film that lost a similar amount of money, gets a 6.4 out of 10.
[00:02:03] The point is, user reviews tend to be quite generous, and a film or TV series has to be really bad to get a very low rating.
[00:02:14] So, let me introduce you to a TV series that is rated a measly 2.8 out of 10 from 31,000 viewers.
[00:02:26] It's called Keeping Up with the Kardashians, and it is currently ranked number 22 on the worst TV series of all time, as per the users of IMDB.
[00:02:38] Let me read you a few reviews of it, to give you a sense of some of the people’s opinions of the show:
[00:02:46] “Makes you sad to be part of the human race”, “This show is 100% pure car crash TV.”, “The worst TV show on the planet....”, “stupid, stupid, stupid”, “The worst thing to ever be shown on television” and a particularly cutting one, “This show is designed by idiots, featuring idiots, for idiots.”
[00:03:08] But this show would go on from 2007 to 2020, earn its creators and its stars hundreds of millions, and, indirectly, billions of dollars, and turn one family into one of the most famous families in the world.
[00:03:29] Even if you think you know nothing about the Kardashians, and have zero interest in what they are up to, the influence of The Kardashians is everywhere.
[00:03:40] So, to find out how they managed to go from relative obscurity to this huge global brand, we need to first talk about some family history.
[00:03:51] The family starts with a mother and father, Robert Kardashian and his wife, Kris.
[00:03:59] Robert was a wealthy businessman and lawyer, but he was cast into the public eye during the trial of OJ Simpson, which we talked about in our last episode.
[00:04:11] Robert had four children with his wife, Kris, before the pair divorced in 1991.
[00:04:20] The children were, in age order, Kourtney, Kim, Khloé and Rob, all with the surname Kardashian.
[00:04:30] A few years after the pair’s divorce, Kris married a former Olympic athlete then called Bruce Jenner, and the pair went on to have two children: Kendall Jenner, and Kylie Jenner.
[00:04:44] So, you had this situation where the Kardashian family, three girls and a boy, lived with their half-sisters, the two Jenner girls.
[00:04:54] The family lived a privileged life in a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles.
[00:05:00] Sure, they lived in a nice house, had fancy cars, and so on, but their lives were not so different to the other wealthy teenagers around them.
[00:05:12] This would all change in 2007, when a cameraman was first invited into their house to film them having a barbecue.
[00:05:22] See, a year earlier, Kris, the children’s mother, had had an idea.
[00:05:28] She had seen the success of another reality TV series about a celebrity family, The Osbournes, and she had approached a TV producer to make the same kind of drama about her family.
[00:05:42] Her youngest child, by the way, Kylie Jenner, was only 9 years old, while the oldest, Kourtney was 28.
[00:05:52] The cameramen came to film this supposedly “natural” Sunday barbecue, the producer saw the tape and managed to get it onto cable TV, creating a series called “Keeping Up With The Kardashians”.
[00:06:07] Now, you may have watched an episode of this TV series, you may not have.
[00:06:12] The basic premise is this: the show follows the day-to-day lives of the Kardashian family, initially the three older daughters, Kourtney, Kim and Khloé. They go shopping, they talk about their lives, they have minor disagreements, but they always make up and talk about how family is so important to them.
[00:06:34] I mean, you heard that the show is one of the lowest rated on IMDB, so there isn’t a huge amount more to it than this.
[00:06:43] Despite being panned, heavily criticised by many, it drew a loyal audience and continued for 14 years, following the daughters as they grew up and did things that many people can relate to: they fell in love, they got married, they got divorced, they struggled with finding their place in the world.
[00:07:05] On one level, completely relatable experiences.
[00:07:10] On the other hand, their lives were so foreign and exotic that they lived in a completely different world. They went on luxurious holidays and travelled on private jets, had personal stylists, they flew their friends to private islands.
[00:07:27] And it was this combination of supposedly “normal” life and “celebrity” life that started to draw people to the show and to its stars.
[00:07:38] These were young women who were just like you.
[00:07:41] Yes, they might live very different lives in terms of the level of luxury and privilege that they enjoyed.
[00:07:48] But they were just a normal family in terms of sibling rivalry, fights, and so on.
[00:07:56] And you didn’t just watch the TV series, you could follow their every move on social media.
[00:08:04] They were relatively early to understand the power of having a personal brand on social media, and the Kardashians, between them, now boast a combined 1.9 billion followers across their social media platforms.
[00:08:20] You could like and comment on their photos, as if you were their friend.
[00:08:25] You would see where they had been, what they've been doing, what they were wearing.
[00:08:31] And soon enough, just like a best friend would, they were more than happy to tell you what to buy so that you could look just like them.
[00:08:42] Sometimes these would be endorsements of other products, “I use x or y make-up brand and it’s amazing”, for which they would charge a hefty fee.
[00:08:53] If you remember Fyre Festival, from episode number 360, one of the sisters, Kendall Jenner, was paid $250,000 for a single Instagram post, and the sisters now reportedly charge a minimum of $100,000 per social media post.
[00:09:13] But it would be through launching their own product lines and selling them to their audience directly that they would go on to really make their millions.
[00:09:24] One of the sisters, Kylie Jenner, declared herself to have become the youngest self-made billionaire in history when she sold half of her cosmetics company at the age of 21, although the extent to which she was both self-made and a billionaire has been questioned.
[00:09:41] And all of the others, all the other sisters, have fingers in lots of different pies, mostly selling some kind of beauty or fashion treatment.
[00:09:53] See, when talking about The Kardashians, talking about “appearance” is unavoidable.
[00:10:01] The TV series that catapulted them to fame is filled with comments about physical appearance.
[00:10:07] The sisters talk about how each other look, their mother tells them that they are looking a bit fat or they should stop eating so much, they are constantly talking about fashion and appearance.
[00:10:20] And their businesses, the products that they have launched, tend to be things that the Kardashians say that they use on a day-to-day basis.
[00:10:30] If you wanted to smell like Kim Kardashian, you could buy her perfume.
[00:10:34] If you wanted a t-shirt like Kendall Jenner, you could buy one for $125.
[00:10:40] If you wanted big lips like Kylie Jenner, you could buy her lip kit for $35.
[00:10:47] If you wanted slightly curvier jeans like Khloé Kardashian, you could buy her jeans for $99.
[00:10:54] Yes, there is a definite “Kardashian look”, but all the sisters were slightly different, so you could choose to look like the one that you felt the most similar to.
[00:11:07] And of course, they would cross-promote each other's stuff, so you could buy products from all of them if you so chose.
[00:11:15] It might sound simple, but it was incredibly effective.
[00:11:19] Use a TV series to get a nationwide, or even global, audience.
[00:11:24] Bring that audience with you to social media and give people an inner look into your supposed private life.
[00:11:33] Use the social media algorithms to grow your audience.
[00:11:37] Continually talk about your life, your beauty routine and the products that you use, and give your hundreds of millions of social media followers the opportunity to do the same as you by buying the products you recommend.
[00:11:52] And this has made the family literally billions of dollars.
[00:11:58] So, was this all a great master plan, devised from the outset, or were they riding a wave, unsure of where it was heading?
[00:12:08] Well, it’s here that we need to reintroduce the mother of the family, Kris Jenner, as up until now she has played a minor role.
[00:12:19] There are many people who believe that the entire thing was her idea, that she is the puppet master who has been pulling the strings from day one.
[00:12:29] There is some compelling evidence behind this theory.
[00:12:33] Firstly, the reality TV show was her idea, that much is well-documented. And in the TV show she can be clearly seen advising the daughters, telling them what to say and how to behave.
[00:12:49] Even before the TV show, it seems that she was laying the groundwork for this big “public launch” of her family.
[00:12:57] At the start of 2007, before the first episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians was released, another Kardashian production was made publicly available.
[00:13:08] This one, however, was not a family friendly TV series; it was a pornographic film that had been made between Kim Kardashian and her then boyfriend.
[00:13:19] According to one biographer of the Kardashian family, this sex tape was leaked by Kim Kardashian under the direct instruction of her mother.
[00:13:32] He even claimed that there were three different sex tapes, and Kim’s mother watched all three and decided to release the one in which Kim looked best.
[00:13:44] Now, the Kardashians have always denied this, but the timing of the release of the tape was certainly convenient.
[00:13:53] At the time, Kim Kardashian was a nobody, really, she had a famous father and a famous stepfather.
[00:14:01] She was in Paris Hilton’s wider circle, and would sometimes be seen in the background of paparazzi photos of her friend Paris Hilton, but she was not much more than that.
[00:14:13] A sceptic might say that she had seen, or rather her mother, had seen the wonders that a leaked sex tape had done for Paris Hilton’s celebrity, and thought, well, the Kardashians have one of those to release when the time is right…
[00:14:28] Then the sex tape got released, and Kim Kardashian went from nowhere to the talk of the town, or at least the talk of some American tabloid press, and this provided the perfect launchpad for the TV series.
[00:14:45] And this brings us neatly to the question of authenticity.
[00:14:51] Everything about the Kardashians revolved around the idea of authenticity. They came to fame with “reality” TV, a TV series that was supposedly unscripted and followed their real day-to-day lives.
[00:15:07] They sold and continue to sell products that they tell their fans they use themselves, their entire brand is based on building an authentic connection between them and their followers.
[00:15:21] But there are plenty of examples that indicate that their authenticity might not be quite what it seems.
[00:15:29] For starters, let’s talk about appearance, as everything with the Kardashians revolves around appearance.
[00:15:37] For years, Kylie Jenner denied having any kind of surgical work done on her lips, despite the fact that they were clearly much larger than before.
[00:15:47] Finally, she admitted, yes, she had had lip filler work done to enlarge her lips.
[00:15:54] Kim denied that she had had work done on her bottom to make it larger, and then admitted that she had.
[00:16:02] And their social media photos are always released with heavy filters, hiding any kind of blemishes or wrinkles or spots.
[00:16:12] Sure, there might not be anything inherently wrong with this, but if you are selling a product and telling your followers that buying this product will make you look like the person in the picture, and the person in the picture has been heavily edited, then it is somewhat deceptive.
[00:16:31] Now, whenever the Kardashians have been caught out for doing this, they have been quick to talk about the perils of social media and how having hundreds of millions of people following your every move means that every inch of your body is scrutinised, and this has unfortunately caused them to take certain actions.
[00:16:50] You might have some sympathy for this, but it’s also important to remember that this media attention and fame is something that has been carefully developed over almost 20 years and has made the family billions of dollars; it is something that they have actively sought out and they use to sell their wares to people all around the world.
[00:17:12] And their influence is vast.
[00:17:15] Perhaps you see this where you live.
[00:17:18] I certainly do.
[00:17:19] The look of large “filled” lips, painted eyebrows and heavily contoured makeup is something that has almost single handedly been popularised by the Kardashian family.
[00:17:31] For better or for worse, they influence the decisions and styles of hundreds of millions of people all over the world, and no doubt future historians will look back at photos of people in 2023 and say “that look was popularised by the Kardashian family”.
[00:17:51] And like them or loathe them, one has to admit that the Kardashian family have mastered the art of celebrity and social media, walking a fine line between reality and performance.
[00:18:03] They've actively crafted personas that feed into a lucrative business model, one that promises reality yet often delivers a carefully edited version of it.
[00:18:14] But how long will this success continue?
[00:18:18] The Kardashians shot to worldwide fame during the "Instagram era", which many would argue has already peaked.
[00:18:27] This era was all about wanting to look perfect and put together, which explains why the Kardashians were so desirable at the time.
[00:18:35] Their heavily edited photos and strategic Instagram posts were illusions of perfection.
[00:18:42] But in 2023, to the millions of people who would have been their customers, authenticity is valued more highly than perfection.
[00:18:52] So, the question remains, how will the Kardashians adapt to this new world?
[00:18:58] Will they manage to remain relevant in the years to come?
[00:19:01] Or have they spent so much of their existence promoting a fake reality that they no longer know what authentic really means?
[00:19:10] Who knows, but if the past 15 years are anything to go by, it seems that there is no length the Kardashian family is not willing to go to be famous.
[00:19:21] OK then, that is it for this little exploration of The Kardashians.
[00:19:27] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:19:31] Are you a fan of the Kardashians? Are they popular in your country?
[00:19:35] Can you see the influence of the Kardashians walking around your town or city?
[00:19:40] And what do you think the rise of the Kardashians tells us about society?
[00:19:45] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:19:49] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:56] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:02] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about an American family, The Kardashians.
[00:00:27] Like them or loathe them, over the past two decades this one family has shaped not just American but global culture, changing the way people look, dress, and behave.
[00:00:41] So, in this episode we are going to tell their story: we’ll look at how they became famous, the influence they've had and continued to have on culture, and whether this is all about to come crumbling down.
[00:00:54] OK then, The Kardashians.
[00:00:59] The popular movie and TV series review site, IMDB.com, is usually a pretty good place to go to get an idea of whether a TV or movie is worth watching.
[00:01:11] The site collects reviews by professional film critics as well as regular people, you or I can review any film and leave a rating.
[00:01:22] The highest rated film on the website is Shawshank Redemption, which gets a rating of 9.3 from a total of 2.8 million viewers.
[00:01:33] And even films that are considered to be huge flops, commercial failures, don’t tend to get such terrible user ratings.
[00:01:43] John Carter, a 2012 film which lost an inflation-adjusted $250 million at the box office gets a 6.6/10, and The Lone Ranger, a film that lost a similar amount of money, gets a 6.4 out of 10.
[00:02:03] The point is, user reviews tend to be quite generous, and a film or TV series has to be really bad to get a very low rating.
[00:02:14] So, let me introduce you to a TV series that is rated a measly 2.8 out of 10 from 31,000 viewers.
[00:02:26] It's called Keeping Up with the Kardashians, and it is currently ranked number 22 on the worst TV series of all time, as per the users of IMDB.
[00:02:38] Let me read you a few reviews of it, to give you a sense of some of the people’s opinions of the show:
[00:02:46] “Makes you sad to be part of the human race”, “This show is 100% pure car crash TV.”, “The worst TV show on the planet....”, “stupid, stupid, stupid”, “The worst thing to ever be shown on television” and a particularly cutting one, “This show is designed by idiots, featuring idiots, for idiots.”
[00:03:08] But this show would go on from 2007 to 2020, earn its creators and its stars hundreds of millions, and, indirectly, billions of dollars, and turn one family into one of the most famous families in the world.
[00:03:29] Even if you think you know nothing about the Kardashians, and have zero interest in what they are up to, the influence of The Kardashians is everywhere.
[00:03:40] So, to find out how they managed to go from relative obscurity to this huge global brand, we need to first talk about some family history.
[00:03:51] The family starts with a mother and father, Robert Kardashian and his wife, Kris.
[00:03:59] Robert was a wealthy businessman and lawyer, but he was cast into the public eye during the trial of OJ Simpson, which we talked about in our last episode.
[00:04:11] Robert had four children with his wife, Kris, before the pair divorced in 1991.
[00:04:20] The children were, in age order, Kourtney, Kim, Khloé and Rob, all with the surname Kardashian.
[00:04:30] A few years after the pair’s divorce, Kris married a former Olympic athlete then called Bruce Jenner, and the pair went on to have two children: Kendall Jenner, and Kylie Jenner.
[00:04:44] So, you had this situation where the Kardashian family, three girls and a boy, lived with their half-sisters, the two Jenner girls.
[00:04:54] The family lived a privileged life in a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles.
[00:05:00] Sure, they lived in a nice house, had fancy cars, and so on, but their lives were not so different to the other wealthy teenagers around them.
[00:05:12] This would all change in 2007, when a cameraman was first invited into their house to film them having a barbecue.
[00:05:22] See, a year earlier, Kris, the children’s mother, had had an idea.
[00:05:28] She had seen the success of another reality TV series about a celebrity family, The Osbournes, and she had approached a TV producer to make the same kind of drama about her family.
[00:05:42] Her youngest child, by the way, Kylie Jenner, was only 9 years old, while the oldest, Kourtney was 28.
[00:05:52] The cameramen came to film this supposedly “natural” Sunday barbecue, the producer saw the tape and managed to get it onto cable TV, creating a series called “Keeping Up With The Kardashians”.
[00:06:07] Now, you may have watched an episode of this TV series, you may not have.
[00:06:12] The basic premise is this: the show follows the day-to-day lives of the Kardashian family, initially the three older daughters, Kourtney, Kim and Khloé. They go shopping, they talk about their lives, they have minor disagreements, but they always make up and talk about how family is so important to them.
[00:06:34] I mean, you heard that the show is one of the lowest rated on IMDB, so there isn’t a huge amount more to it than this.
[00:06:43] Despite being panned, heavily criticised by many, it drew a loyal audience and continued for 14 years, following the daughters as they grew up and did things that many people can relate to: they fell in love, they got married, they got divorced, they struggled with finding their place in the world.
[00:07:05] On one level, completely relatable experiences.
[00:07:10] On the other hand, their lives were so foreign and exotic that they lived in a completely different world. They went on luxurious holidays and travelled on private jets, had personal stylists, they flew their friends to private islands.
[00:07:27] And it was this combination of supposedly “normal” life and “celebrity” life that started to draw people to the show and to its stars.
[00:07:38] These were young women who were just like you.
[00:07:41] Yes, they might live very different lives in terms of the level of luxury and privilege that they enjoyed.
[00:07:48] But they were just a normal family in terms of sibling rivalry, fights, and so on.
[00:07:56] And you didn’t just watch the TV series, you could follow their every move on social media.
[00:08:04] They were relatively early to understand the power of having a personal brand on social media, and the Kardashians, between them, now boast a combined 1.9 billion followers across their social media platforms.
[00:08:20] You could like and comment on their photos, as if you were their friend.
[00:08:25] You would see where they had been, what they've been doing, what they were wearing.
[00:08:31] And soon enough, just like a best friend would, they were more than happy to tell you what to buy so that you could look just like them.
[00:08:42] Sometimes these would be endorsements of other products, “I use x or y make-up brand and it’s amazing”, for which they would charge a hefty fee.
[00:08:53] If you remember Fyre Festival, from episode number 360, one of the sisters, Kendall Jenner, was paid $250,000 for a single Instagram post, and the sisters now reportedly charge a minimum of $100,000 per social media post.
[00:09:13] But it would be through launching their own product lines and selling them to their audience directly that they would go on to really make their millions.
[00:09:24] One of the sisters, Kylie Jenner, declared herself to have become the youngest self-made billionaire in history when she sold half of her cosmetics company at the age of 21, although the extent to which she was both self-made and a billionaire has been questioned.
[00:09:41] And all of the others, all the other sisters, have fingers in lots of different pies, mostly selling some kind of beauty or fashion treatment.
[00:09:53] See, when talking about The Kardashians, talking about “appearance” is unavoidable.
[00:10:01] The TV series that catapulted them to fame is filled with comments about physical appearance.
[00:10:07] The sisters talk about how each other look, their mother tells them that they are looking a bit fat or they should stop eating so much, they are constantly talking about fashion and appearance.
[00:10:20] And their businesses, the products that they have launched, tend to be things that the Kardashians say that they use on a day-to-day basis.
[00:10:30] If you wanted to smell like Kim Kardashian, you could buy her perfume.
[00:10:34] If you wanted a t-shirt like Kendall Jenner, you could buy one for $125.
[00:10:40] If you wanted big lips like Kylie Jenner, you could buy her lip kit for $35.
[00:10:47] If you wanted slightly curvier jeans like Khloé Kardashian, you could buy her jeans for $99.
[00:10:54] Yes, there is a definite “Kardashian look”, but all the sisters were slightly different, so you could choose to look like the one that you felt the most similar to.
[00:11:07] And of course, they would cross-promote each other's stuff, so you could buy products from all of them if you so chose.
[00:11:15] It might sound simple, but it was incredibly effective.
[00:11:19] Use a TV series to get a nationwide, or even global, audience.
[00:11:24] Bring that audience with you to social media and give people an inner look into your supposed private life.
[00:11:33] Use the social media algorithms to grow your audience.
[00:11:37] Continually talk about your life, your beauty routine and the products that you use, and give your hundreds of millions of social media followers the opportunity to do the same as you by buying the products you recommend.
[00:11:52] And this has made the family literally billions of dollars.
[00:11:58] So, was this all a great master plan, devised from the outset, or were they riding a wave, unsure of where it was heading?
[00:12:08] Well, it’s here that we need to reintroduce the mother of the family, Kris Jenner, as up until now she has played a minor role.
[00:12:19] There are many people who believe that the entire thing was her idea, that she is the puppet master who has been pulling the strings from day one.
[00:12:29] There is some compelling evidence behind this theory.
[00:12:33] Firstly, the reality TV show was her idea, that much is well-documented. And in the TV show she can be clearly seen advising the daughters, telling them what to say and how to behave.
[00:12:49] Even before the TV show, it seems that she was laying the groundwork for this big “public launch” of her family.
[00:12:57] At the start of 2007, before the first episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians was released, another Kardashian production was made publicly available.
[00:13:08] This one, however, was not a family friendly TV series; it was a pornographic film that had been made between Kim Kardashian and her then boyfriend.
[00:13:19] According to one biographer of the Kardashian family, this sex tape was leaked by Kim Kardashian under the direct instruction of her mother.
[00:13:32] He even claimed that there were three different sex tapes, and Kim’s mother watched all three and decided to release the one in which Kim looked best.
[00:13:44] Now, the Kardashians have always denied this, but the timing of the release of the tape was certainly convenient.
[00:13:53] At the time, Kim Kardashian was a nobody, really, she had a famous father and a famous stepfather.
[00:14:01] She was in Paris Hilton’s wider circle, and would sometimes be seen in the background of paparazzi photos of her friend Paris Hilton, but she was not much more than that.
[00:14:13] A sceptic might say that she had seen, or rather her mother, had seen the wonders that a leaked sex tape had done for Paris Hilton’s celebrity, and thought, well, the Kardashians have one of those to release when the time is right…
[00:14:28] Then the sex tape got released, and Kim Kardashian went from nowhere to the talk of the town, or at least the talk of some American tabloid press, and this provided the perfect launchpad for the TV series.
[00:14:45] And this brings us neatly to the question of authenticity.
[00:14:51] Everything about the Kardashians revolved around the idea of authenticity. They came to fame with “reality” TV, a TV series that was supposedly unscripted and followed their real day-to-day lives.
[00:15:07] They sold and continue to sell products that they tell their fans they use themselves, their entire brand is based on building an authentic connection between them and their followers.
[00:15:21] But there are plenty of examples that indicate that their authenticity might not be quite what it seems.
[00:15:29] For starters, let’s talk about appearance, as everything with the Kardashians revolves around appearance.
[00:15:37] For years, Kylie Jenner denied having any kind of surgical work done on her lips, despite the fact that they were clearly much larger than before.
[00:15:47] Finally, she admitted, yes, she had had lip filler work done to enlarge her lips.
[00:15:54] Kim denied that she had had work done on her bottom to make it larger, and then admitted that she had.
[00:16:02] And their social media photos are always released with heavy filters, hiding any kind of blemishes or wrinkles or spots.
[00:16:12] Sure, there might not be anything inherently wrong with this, but if you are selling a product and telling your followers that buying this product will make you look like the person in the picture, and the person in the picture has been heavily edited, then it is somewhat deceptive.
[00:16:31] Now, whenever the Kardashians have been caught out for doing this, they have been quick to talk about the perils of social media and how having hundreds of millions of people following your every move means that every inch of your body is scrutinised, and this has unfortunately caused them to take certain actions.
[00:16:50] You might have some sympathy for this, but it’s also important to remember that this media attention and fame is something that has been carefully developed over almost 20 years and has made the family billions of dollars; it is something that they have actively sought out and they use to sell their wares to people all around the world.
[00:17:12] And their influence is vast.
[00:17:15] Perhaps you see this where you live.
[00:17:18] I certainly do.
[00:17:19] The look of large “filled” lips, painted eyebrows and heavily contoured makeup is something that has almost single handedly been popularised by the Kardashian family.
[00:17:31] For better or for worse, they influence the decisions and styles of hundreds of millions of people all over the world, and no doubt future historians will look back at photos of people in 2023 and say “that look was popularised by the Kardashian family”.
[00:17:51] And like them or loathe them, one has to admit that the Kardashian family have mastered the art of celebrity and social media, walking a fine line between reality and performance.
[00:18:03] They've actively crafted personas that feed into a lucrative business model, one that promises reality yet often delivers a carefully edited version of it.
[00:18:14] But how long will this success continue?
[00:18:18] The Kardashians shot to worldwide fame during the "Instagram era", which many would argue has already peaked.
[00:18:27] This era was all about wanting to look perfect and put together, which explains why the Kardashians were so desirable at the time.
[00:18:35] Their heavily edited photos and strategic Instagram posts were illusions of perfection.
[00:18:42] But in 2023, to the millions of people who would have been their customers, authenticity is valued more highly than perfection.
[00:18:52] So, the question remains, how will the Kardashians adapt to this new world?
[00:18:58] Will they manage to remain relevant in the years to come?
[00:19:01] Or have they spent so much of their existence promoting a fake reality that they no longer know what authentic really means?
[00:19:10] Who knows, but if the past 15 years are anything to go by, it seems that there is no length the Kardashian family is not willing to go to be famous.
[00:19:21] OK then, that is it for this little exploration of The Kardashians.
[00:19:27] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:19:31] Are you a fan of the Kardashians? Are they popular in your country?
[00:19:35] Can you see the influence of the Kardashians walking around your town or city?
[00:19:40] And what do you think the rise of the Kardashians tells us about society?
[00:19:45] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:19:49] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:56] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:02] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about an American family, The Kardashians.
[00:00:27] Like them or loathe them, over the past two decades this one family has shaped not just American but global culture, changing the way people look, dress, and behave.
[00:00:41] So, in this episode we are going to tell their story: we’ll look at how they became famous, the influence they've had and continued to have on culture, and whether this is all about to come crumbling down.
[00:00:54] OK then, The Kardashians.
[00:00:59] The popular movie and TV series review site, IMDB.com, is usually a pretty good place to go to get an idea of whether a TV or movie is worth watching.
[00:01:11] The site collects reviews by professional film critics as well as regular people, you or I can review any film and leave a rating.
[00:01:22] The highest rated film on the website is Shawshank Redemption, which gets a rating of 9.3 from a total of 2.8 million viewers.
[00:01:33] And even films that are considered to be huge flops, commercial failures, don’t tend to get such terrible user ratings.
[00:01:43] John Carter, a 2012 film which lost an inflation-adjusted $250 million at the box office gets a 6.6/10, and The Lone Ranger, a film that lost a similar amount of money, gets a 6.4 out of 10.
[00:02:03] The point is, user reviews tend to be quite generous, and a film or TV series has to be really bad to get a very low rating.
[00:02:14] So, let me introduce you to a TV series that is rated a measly 2.8 out of 10 from 31,000 viewers.
[00:02:26] It's called Keeping Up with the Kardashians, and it is currently ranked number 22 on the worst TV series of all time, as per the users of IMDB.
[00:02:38] Let me read you a few reviews of it, to give you a sense of some of the people’s opinions of the show:
[00:02:46] “Makes you sad to be part of the human race”, “This show is 100% pure car crash TV.”, “The worst TV show on the planet....”, “stupid, stupid, stupid”, “The worst thing to ever be shown on television” and a particularly cutting one, “This show is designed by idiots, featuring idiots, for idiots.”
[00:03:08] But this show would go on from 2007 to 2020, earn its creators and its stars hundreds of millions, and, indirectly, billions of dollars, and turn one family into one of the most famous families in the world.
[00:03:29] Even if you think you know nothing about the Kardashians, and have zero interest in what they are up to, the influence of The Kardashians is everywhere.
[00:03:40] So, to find out how they managed to go from relative obscurity to this huge global brand, we need to first talk about some family history.
[00:03:51] The family starts with a mother and father, Robert Kardashian and his wife, Kris.
[00:03:59] Robert was a wealthy businessman and lawyer, but he was cast into the public eye during the trial of OJ Simpson, which we talked about in our last episode.
[00:04:11] Robert had four children with his wife, Kris, before the pair divorced in 1991.
[00:04:20] The children were, in age order, Kourtney, Kim, Khloé and Rob, all with the surname Kardashian.
[00:04:30] A few years after the pair’s divorce, Kris married a former Olympic athlete then called Bruce Jenner, and the pair went on to have two children: Kendall Jenner, and Kylie Jenner.
[00:04:44] So, you had this situation where the Kardashian family, three girls and a boy, lived with their half-sisters, the two Jenner girls.
[00:04:54] The family lived a privileged life in a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles.
[00:05:00] Sure, they lived in a nice house, had fancy cars, and so on, but their lives were not so different to the other wealthy teenagers around them.
[00:05:12] This would all change in 2007, when a cameraman was first invited into their house to film them having a barbecue.
[00:05:22] See, a year earlier, Kris, the children’s mother, had had an idea.
[00:05:28] She had seen the success of another reality TV series about a celebrity family, The Osbournes, and she had approached a TV producer to make the same kind of drama about her family.
[00:05:42] Her youngest child, by the way, Kylie Jenner, was only 9 years old, while the oldest, Kourtney was 28.
[00:05:52] The cameramen came to film this supposedly “natural” Sunday barbecue, the producer saw the tape and managed to get it onto cable TV, creating a series called “Keeping Up With The Kardashians”.
[00:06:07] Now, you may have watched an episode of this TV series, you may not have.
[00:06:12] The basic premise is this: the show follows the day-to-day lives of the Kardashian family, initially the three older daughters, Kourtney, Kim and Khloé. They go shopping, they talk about their lives, they have minor disagreements, but they always make up and talk about how family is so important to them.
[00:06:34] I mean, you heard that the show is one of the lowest rated on IMDB, so there isn’t a huge amount more to it than this.
[00:06:43] Despite being panned, heavily criticised by many, it drew a loyal audience and continued for 14 years, following the daughters as they grew up and did things that many people can relate to: they fell in love, they got married, they got divorced, they struggled with finding their place in the world.
[00:07:05] On one level, completely relatable experiences.
[00:07:10] On the other hand, their lives were so foreign and exotic that they lived in a completely different world. They went on luxurious holidays and travelled on private jets, had personal stylists, they flew their friends to private islands.
[00:07:27] And it was this combination of supposedly “normal” life and “celebrity” life that started to draw people to the show and to its stars.
[00:07:38] These were young women who were just like you.
[00:07:41] Yes, they might live very different lives in terms of the level of luxury and privilege that they enjoyed.
[00:07:48] But they were just a normal family in terms of sibling rivalry, fights, and so on.
[00:07:56] And you didn’t just watch the TV series, you could follow their every move on social media.
[00:08:04] They were relatively early to understand the power of having a personal brand on social media, and the Kardashians, between them, now boast a combined 1.9 billion followers across their social media platforms.
[00:08:20] You could like and comment on their photos, as if you were their friend.
[00:08:25] You would see where they had been, what they've been doing, what they were wearing.
[00:08:31] And soon enough, just like a best friend would, they were more than happy to tell you what to buy so that you could look just like them.
[00:08:42] Sometimes these would be endorsements of other products, “I use x or y make-up brand and it’s amazing”, for which they would charge a hefty fee.
[00:08:53] If you remember Fyre Festival, from episode number 360, one of the sisters, Kendall Jenner, was paid $250,000 for a single Instagram post, and the sisters now reportedly charge a minimum of $100,000 per social media post.
[00:09:13] But it would be through launching their own product lines and selling them to their audience directly that they would go on to really make their millions.
[00:09:24] One of the sisters, Kylie Jenner, declared herself to have become the youngest self-made billionaire in history when she sold half of her cosmetics company at the age of 21, although the extent to which she was both self-made and a billionaire has been questioned.
[00:09:41] And all of the others, all the other sisters, have fingers in lots of different pies, mostly selling some kind of beauty or fashion treatment.
[00:09:53] See, when talking about The Kardashians, talking about “appearance” is unavoidable.
[00:10:01] The TV series that catapulted them to fame is filled with comments about physical appearance.
[00:10:07] The sisters talk about how each other look, their mother tells them that they are looking a bit fat or they should stop eating so much, they are constantly talking about fashion and appearance.
[00:10:20] And their businesses, the products that they have launched, tend to be things that the Kardashians say that they use on a day-to-day basis.
[00:10:30] If you wanted to smell like Kim Kardashian, you could buy her perfume.
[00:10:34] If you wanted a t-shirt like Kendall Jenner, you could buy one for $125.
[00:10:40] If you wanted big lips like Kylie Jenner, you could buy her lip kit for $35.
[00:10:47] If you wanted slightly curvier jeans like Khloé Kardashian, you could buy her jeans for $99.
[00:10:54] Yes, there is a definite “Kardashian look”, but all the sisters were slightly different, so you could choose to look like the one that you felt the most similar to.
[00:11:07] And of course, they would cross-promote each other's stuff, so you could buy products from all of them if you so chose.
[00:11:15] It might sound simple, but it was incredibly effective.
[00:11:19] Use a TV series to get a nationwide, or even global, audience.
[00:11:24] Bring that audience with you to social media and give people an inner look into your supposed private life.
[00:11:33] Use the social media algorithms to grow your audience.
[00:11:37] Continually talk about your life, your beauty routine and the products that you use, and give your hundreds of millions of social media followers the opportunity to do the same as you by buying the products you recommend.
[00:11:52] And this has made the family literally billions of dollars.
[00:11:58] So, was this all a great master plan, devised from the outset, or were they riding a wave, unsure of where it was heading?
[00:12:08] Well, it’s here that we need to reintroduce the mother of the family, Kris Jenner, as up until now she has played a minor role.
[00:12:19] There are many people who believe that the entire thing was her idea, that she is the puppet master who has been pulling the strings from day one.
[00:12:29] There is some compelling evidence behind this theory.
[00:12:33] Firstly, the reality TV show was her idea, that much is well-documented. And in the TV show she can be clearly seen advising the daughters, telling them what to say and how to behave.
[00:12:49] Even before the TV show, it seems that she was laying the groundwork for this big “public launch” of her family.
[00:12:57] At the start of 2007, before the first episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians was released, another Kardashian production was made publicly available.
[00:13:08] This one, however, was not a family friendly TV series; it was a pornographic film that had been made between Kim Kardashian and her then boyfriend.
[00:13:19] According to one biographer of the Kardashian family, this sex tape was leaked by Kim Kardashian under the direct instruction of her mother.
[00:13:32] He even claimed that there were three different sex tapes, and Kim’s mother watched all three and decided to release the one in which Kim looked best.
[00:13:44] Now, the Kardashians have always denied this, but the timing of the release of the tape was certainly convenient.
[00:13:53] At the time, Kim Kardashian was a nobody, really, she had a famous father and a famous stepfather.
[00:14:01] She was in Paris Hilton’s wider circle, and would sometimes be seen in the background of paparazzi photos of her friend Paris Hilton, but she was not much more than that.
[00:14:13] A sceptic might say that she had seen, or rather her mother, had seen the wonders that a leaked sex tape had done for Paris Hilton’s celebrity, and thought, well, the Kardashians have one of those to release when the time is right…
[00:14:28] Then the sex tape got released, and Kim Kardashian went from nowhere to the talk of the town, or at least the talk of some American tabloid press, and this provided the perfect launchpad for the TV series.
[00:14:45] And this brings us neatly to the question of authenticity.
[00:14:51] Everything about the Kardashians revolved around the idea of authenticity. They came to fame with “reality” TV, a TV series that was supposedly unscripted and followed their real day-to-day lives.
[00:15:07] They sold and continue to sell products that they tell their fans they use themselves, their entire brand is based on building an authentic connection between them and their followers.
[00:15:21] But there are plenty of examples that indicate that their authenticity might not be quite what it seems.
[00:15:29] For starters, let’s talk about appearance, as everything with the Kardashians revolves around appearance.
[00:15:37] For years, Kylie Jenner denied having any kind of surgical work done on her lips, despite the fact that they were clearly much larger than before.
[00:15:47] Finally, she admitted, yes, she had had lip filler work done to enlarge her lips.
[00:15:54] Kim denied that she had had work done on her bottom to make it larger, and then admitted that she had.
[00:16:02] And their social media photos are always released with heavy filters, hiding any kind of blemishes or wrinkles or spots.
[00:16:12] Sure, there might not be anything inherently wrong with this, but if you are selling a product and telling your followers that buying this product will make you look like the person in the picture, and the person in the picture has been heavily edited, then it is somewhat deceptive.
[00:16:31] Now, whenever the Kardashians have been caught out for doing this, they have been quick to talk about the perils of social media and how having hundreds of millions of people following your every move means that every inch of your body is scrutinised, and this has unfortunately caused them to take certain actions.
[00:16:50] You might have some sympathy for this, but it’s also important to remember that this media attention and fame is something that has been carefully developed over almost 20 years and has made the family billions of dollars; it is something that they have actively sought out and they use to sell their wares to people all around the world.
[00:17:12] And their influence is vast.
[00:17:15] Perhaps you see this where you live.
[00:17:18] I certainly do.
[00:17:19] The look of large “filled” lips, painted eyebrows and heavily contoured makeup is something that has almost single handedly been popularised by the Kardashian family.
[00:17:31] For better or for worse, they influence the decisions and styles of hundreds of millions of people all over the world, and no doubt future historians will look back at photos of people in 2023 and say “that look was popularised by the Kardashian family”.
[00:17:51] And like them or loathe them, one has to admit that the Kardashian family have mastered the art of celebrity and social media, walking a fine line between reality and performance.
[00:18:03] They've actively crafted personas that feed into a lucrative business model, one that promises reality yet often delivers a carefully edited version of it.
[00:18:14] But how long will this success continue?
[00:18:18] The Kardashians shot to worldwide fame during the "Instagram era", which many would argue has already peaked.
[00:18:27] This era was all about wanting to look perfect and put together, which explains why the Kardashians were so desirable at the time.
[00:18:35] Their heavily edited photos and strategic Instagram posts were illusions of perfection.
[00:18:42] But in 2023, to the millions of people who would have been their customers, authenticity is valued more highly than perfection.
[00:18:52] So, the question remains, how will the Kardashians adapt to this new world?
[00:18:58] Will they manage to remain relevant in the years to come?
[00:19:01] Or have they spent so much of their existence promoting a fake reality that they no longer know what authentic really means?
[00:19:10] Who knows, but if the past 15 years are anything to go by, it seems that there is no length the Kardashian family is not willing to go to be famous.
[00:19:21] OK then, that is it for this little exploration of The Kardashians.
[00:19:27] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:19:31] Are you a fan of the Kardashians? Are they popular in your country?
[00:19:35] Can you see the influence of the Kardashians walking around your town or city?
[00:19:40] And what do you think the rise of the Kardashians tells us about society?
[00:19:45] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:19:49] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:56] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:02] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
