Why Kim Kardashian's look is the most relevant of the MET Gala 2021 (although no one dares to say it)
The looks of the MET Gala 2021 have been analyzed to exhaustion. But no one has dared to talk about Kim Kardashian's total black look, which has made history in the world of culture. We analyze it from the hand of an art expert.
The MET Gala 2021 has left looks to remember. But among tracksuits, claims and emulations of the great divas of the golden Hollywood, a celebrity (the biggest celebrity of the moment) has stood out with a provocative, allegorical, incoherent and very striking outfit: Kim Kardashian.
And in the face of the incapacity of analysis, in the face of total confusion, silence. Journalists, critics and simple users of social networks have dedicated themselves to either ignoring the total black look of the oldest of the Kardashian Klan or to ridicule it, reducing it to a new departure from the queen of reality shows.
Kim Kardashian appeared on the red carpet completely covered in black, from head to toe, hiding her face and with a single tail of artificial black hair escaping from the textile cage signed by Demna Gvasalia for Balenciaga in a kind of modern burqa . Faced with the sensuality of her sister Kendall Jenner, who emulated the classicism of Audrey Hepburn, Kim Kardashian was a shadow, a negative of the overexposure in which she lives (and from which she profits) in her day to day life. The person who has sold absolutely her entire life and whose career began with the leak of an intimate video decides to hide, on the most important night of the year in terms of fashion and celebrities, behind her precisely a dress.
Kim Kardashian was a mannequin, a mannequin that represents herself, on which she projects and requires us to decode her. This is what she has based her entire career on: our ability to identify her. And we identify her precisely thanks to the curvilinear figure that she has cultivated and that identifies her (let's remember the perfume of her that she took in a mold of her body). We know that a celebrity is an icon when we can identify her from her silhouette (be it Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Woody Allen), but to this Kim Kardashian adds references to her marriage (with which she also plays to code her private life ) with Kanye West, even to BDSM or the unreal world of The Matrix.
Reading Kim Kardashian's look today is like reading a Picasso painting 60 years ago: it is necessary to analyze and delve into its meaning. That is the opinion of Catalina Martín Lloris, doctor in Art History and professor at the Catholic University of Valencia: "Saving the distances, it reminded me of how it must have been the moment in which in the Armory Show - the International Exhibition of Modern Art - the The jury, expecting to see precious works, came across Duchamp's 'Urinal', or the provocation caused by Malevich's 'Black Square on White Background' in 1917. The toilet was destroyed and the 'Black Square on White Background' was rejected "This is not art," they said, "it is a joke," and yet today we could not understand contemporary art without these essential works. "
In addition to a possible reflection on the use of black, for many considered not as a color but as the total absence of color, it could be said that Kim Kardashian has always been a reflection of the surrounding reality, and instead has now become in a "black hole". Martín Lloris pointed out a possible relationship with Anish Kapoor's vantablack, although the reflection on ugliness is more interesting: "On Monday night the public who followed the gala affirmed that the model worn by Kardashian was not fashion. But it was It is, of course, it is, especially if it is signed by Balenciaga, who for a few years has been working on the aesthetics of the ugly -another very interesting subject to analyze-. Today we no longer talk about contemporary art reduced to painting, sculpture, architecture, today They talk about visual culture because images invade everything and because art comes out of museums and we find it in advertising, in videos, gifs, memes ... the Kardashian moment last night was a total visual impact, of those who do visual culture ".
Is the look of Kim Kardashian, the figure of Kim Kardashian itself, a contribution then to contemporary art and culture? Martín Lloris is clear about it. "In my Art History classes I tell the students that we must redefine beauty, we have to flee from the tyranny of beauty as a commonplace of current art education. Abandon the I like 'or' I don't like it 'as a judgment aesthetic. As happened in the art of the avant-garde, beauty is not only what is beautiful, but what generates meaning in us, which bothers and questions us. A political, critical, difficult and often uncomfortable beauty. A beauty that maintains us expectant, that makes us think and that, from the restlessness, makes us feel better, more committed, more involved. A beauty that gives us food for thought. A beauty that leads us to learning ".
As María Acaso, founding partner of the Pedagogías Invisibles collective and head of the Education Area of the Reina Sofía Museum, says, current visual culture is the passage from an empty aesthetic result to an ugly but questioning process. "The ugly or the uncomfortable, what society considers unpleasant and not harmonious, can be understood as beautiful because it connects us with the problems of our social reality," adds Dr. Catalina Martín Lloris. What was Kim Kardashian -or Balenciaga- talking about the night of the Met? From all of this. "The images that invade us every day tell us who we should be, what we should wear, how we should behave or what we have to do. And that woman totally dressed in black was an authentic performance that criticized this tyranny of beauty, of what we society imposes through images. A performance that should lead us to generate meaning, to ask ourselves why it has bothered us, why it has bothered us. A performance that has kept us expectant. A beauty that has given us what to think about and why it has bothered us. It has led to learning. Fashion, last night more than ever, became a visual culture that provokes, bothers, bothers and makes us think. It's fascinating. "
