Tatler Russia (which I'd been trying to pretend wasn't a thing) is running our good old friend Kim Kardashian on the cover of its January issue, which seems like a really aggressive gesture. Or a cry for help?
The reality TV star seems almost too perfect for the gossip mag's Russian edition. If Kardashian seems downmarket in the U.S., she's almost aspirational in this context. I've always thought that Russians have a weird relationship to American pop culture, a kind of blind mix of attraction and revulsion to anything and everything that's big and shiny and American, without any deeper sense of where it comes from and how it works.
If Kardashian is our National Punching Bag*, I think that in Russia, she holds a much more desirable position: she's Famous American TV Star** — wow! Which is why she gets to make that face on the cover of one of the country's largest national magazines. (Although as ckgirlbr says in the corresponding TFS Forum thread, "A duck face is the last thing I want to see on a cover.")
The cover line translates to something like, "The Victories and Wounds of Kim Kardashian" — a pretty epic way of talking about someone that got famous by being in a sex tape and stayed famous by participating in a reality show about her nothing life. At least if an American magazine ran that caption, we could suppose they were being ironic.
Dear Tatler Russia: Thanks for taking Kim Kardashian off our hands for a second, but I'd prefer to let her self-combust in the privacy of her own media universe***. Doesn't Russia have its own fabulous and obnoxious socialities? I'm pretty sure they'd happily prattle on about their victories and wounds.
*Which is messed up, actually. Let's stop doing that? Okay, *I* will try to stop doing that.
**As a Russian, I am uniquely qualified to mock my own people and I hope you can understand that I tease out of love. But I do truly think Russians need to stop their horrible envy/worship of American stuff. A lot of American stuff (like Kim Kardashian's tabloid career!) is really awful.
***Being mean to Kim Kardashian is a hard habit to break. Ugh, I'm such a hypocrite.
Image via TFS Forums
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Via: Tatler Russia Finds Its Soulmate Cover Star: Kim Kardashian