"The Kardashians", the kingdom of emptiness and greige

Fifteen years after everyone else, I discovered the grey, beige and opulent universe of the most redneck royal family that exists.

If you had asked me a month ago to identify Kourtney Kardashian or Kendall Jenner in a line-up, I probably wouldn't have been able to. You may not believe me, but I have already amply demonstrated my ability to avoid an inevitable pop culture phenomenon. Like Friends and “Les Marseillais,” the Kardashians are one of those cultural supernovas that I managed to ignore as forcefully as the false calls from the Personal Training Account.

Beyond some basic knowledge of Kim Kardashian (sex-tape, contouring, Kanye West), I never had the slightest curiosity for the incessant gossip around her family, nor for their reality TV show launched in 2007. , or for their influence in the world of beauty and fashion – from what I've seen, their love of lycra, greige[1] and ski goggles really doesn't bother me vibrate.

But there. Having recently contracted a very fashionable respiratory virus, I had to find something to occupy my days of isolation without overstimulating my neural connections. Between two fits of coughing, stranded on my couch, I came across the new show “The Kardashians” on Disney+. Having never heard these people speak, I then said to myself that it was time to finally discover the sound of their voice, and above all, to try to understand what the world found in this extremely wealthy family, often accused of appropriate the Afro-American aesthetic.

consumerist show

Readers, in a few episodes, I understood everything. I understood the delirious fascination, the hundreds of millions of followers on Instagram, the empire built on emptiness. Maybe it was the fever, but suddenly I wanted to know everything about their lives, be their pal, share salads with them, skin them and impersonate them to live in their gigantic beige houses.

I was hypnotized by their manufactured beauty, their unearthly plastic, their airbag-clad alien bodies. Suddenly, I too wanted a padded life devoid of personality, nails longer than Meryl Streep's resume, blonde hair extensions and buttock implants. I too wanted to have lots of sisters, live 100 meters from my mother's house and have a dressing room the size of Corsica.

Yes, because let's be honest: the main draw of this show is its opulence. Like everyone else, I follow certain American celebrities on Instagram just so I can gaze at their homes. But while watching “The Kardashians,” I realized that all of my little stars were just proletarians by comparison. Suddenly, it was like going from the small basin to the Olympic swimming pool.