We can think of a couple of photoshoots where Kim Kardashian’s bum has taken pride of place, but we’ve got to hand it to Paper magazine, as their quest to ‘break the internet’ with her form (or rather, everyone’s obsession with it) seems to be working.
Featuring Kim in a fancy up-do, a neck-full of pearls and evening gloves, and pulling a dress down over her shiny body, one feature is very prominent. Her naked bum! It’s prominent because it’s big, and it’s big because, well, Jean-Paul Goude, the photographer, probably made it big.
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The alternative cover is a re-make of his Champagne Incident photo where a naked woman pops Champagne in front of her, and the burst of fizz loops all the way over her head back onto her bum, which is so positively posterior, there’s a Champagne glass resting on it, ready to catch the wine. In 2014’s version, Kim’s fully clothed.
Both shots have ‘BREAK THE INTERNET’ underneath.
‘For our winter issue, we gave ourselves one assignment: Break The Internet,’ Paper explained. ‘There is no other person that we can think of who is up to the task than one Kim Kardashian West. A pop culture fascination able to generate headlines just by leaving her house, Kim is what makes the web tick.’
We could spend a little while musing about how the photo is a comment on upward mobility in America, how bling culture’s moved on to something way more sophisticated thanks to Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. But the internet has broken.
Jean-Paul Goude isn’t new to this: he spent most of the 80s playing with Grace Jones’s body – most iconically, on the cover of her album, Island Life, to make it look totally otherworldly.
Just FYI, nobody can actually contort themselves into that position, the image was altered by old-school pre-computer re-touching. Goude also got Naomi Campbell to race against a cheetah and did a bunch of shoots for Chanel, Jean-Paul Gaultier… we could go on.
Anyway, Goude has been accused of racism in his quest to fetishise and adapt these non-white bodies. He is ‘stunned’ by that criticsm and said a couple of years ago that such critics ‘turn everything inside-out and tear everything apart.’
We don’t entirely agree, but if his images are a comment on how we as society treat non-white bodies, then we kind of get it because the response to Kim Kardashian’s bum is nothing short of hysterical.
From comments like: ‘I cannot stand that comedy backside’ to ‘goal in life?’ – it is doing exactly what it set out to do. The photoshoot, that is, not the bum.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.