Did Kim Kardashian steal from Black culture to build her body, brands and profit? New study investigated.

The Kardashians are a high-profile white American family with a global influence on fashion and beauty. Their sculpted bodies have attracted a great deal of attention over the years, and Kim Kardashian’s changing butt has been a particular focus. A curvier butt is more common in Black women, but cosmetic procedures like the reversible Brazilian butt lift can allow anyone to achieve a perkier or voluptuous rear, provided they have the means to do so. Like all trends, they come and go, and a larger butt can be in fashion one season but not the next.

New research from Brunel University London explored whether Kim Kardashian used a part of Black culture to build her brand and to profit.

Since 2007, the Kardashians have appeared in their own reality television series and have graced many a red carpet and advertising campaigns.Kim Kardashian has been the centrepiece of their award-winning fly-on-the-wall series, and with over 360 million Instagram followers, she has a huge platform to promote her many businesses, brands and endorsements.

Prof Meredith Jones, a Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at Brunel University London, who conducted the study, said: “The Kardashians have a celebrity which is entrepreneurial and global, and Kim uses her body to promote her brands and to send out messages.

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“Kim appears to have made use of the BBL’s reversibility, and its rise and fall in popularity signals a brief period when a specific form of surplus citizenship was fashionable.”

Obama’s presidency and the rise of larger butts

Prof Jones believes that it is no coincidence that the popularity and decline of the BBL somewhat paralleled Barack Obama’s presidency.

“Obama was America’s first black president, in office from 2009–2017, and during his presidency, some Black cultural features were ‘on trend’, including a larger butt,” said Prof Jones.

“Kim capitalised on this trend by straddling established white forms of beauty and adopting select Black ones,” explained Prof Jones. “One could argue that she used her cultural and financial capital to play at surplus citizenship, particularly in a Black sense, in a moment when Blackness was fashionable, increasing her wealth and fame before discarding it bodily and fading back to white, and therefore reverting to a comfortable neutral citizenship.”