Vapid. Crass. A flash in the pan in terms of anything substantial.
When it comes to the Kardashians, they are often cited as the kings and (mostly) queens of the megapolis that is reality TV. Playing Andy Warhol's "15 minutes of fame" to the extreme via the modernity of social media, the Kardashians have managed to outshine the dethroned reality stars of the 90s in quite literally every way possible.
And yet, for the youngest of the clan, Kylie Jenner, it seems that such gilded fame has parlayed itself into very real results. Read: nearly one billion dollars of payoff.
Forbes broke the news recently that Kylie is, by way of her makeup startup Kylie Cosmetics, fast approaching a net worth of one billion dollars…if she's not already there. As the magazine states, a conservative estimate places her at $900 million. At only 20 years old, crossing the billion-dollar mark would make Kylie the youngest self-made billionaire, male or female, in history.
This is, in more ways than one, staggering.
Now, to be frank, there is something to dispute when it comes to that designation of "self-made". While Kylie technically invested all the initial money to begin Kylie Cosmetics (a makeup company that originally focused solely on lip enhancement kits but has since expanded to other product lines) from her own coffers, there is no denying that her success is, at least in part, tied into the larger Kardashian brand.
After all, it's the collective product as a whole that people pay to see. The full grotesqueness of Keeping Up with the Kardashians on display is what drives people to idolize and the Kardashian-Jenners to monetize. It's the packaged set that the circus sells that brings fame to the likes of Kim, Khloe, Kris and all the others. And while Kylie has some 111 million followers on Instagram in her own right (second only to Kim amongst all family members) the "famous for being famous" business model works best if there are multiple assets to utilize and (inevitably) exploit along the way. Kylie is just one of those assets.
Still, that's not to say what she has accomplished isn't impressive. For all my general malcontent with the reality TV setup to begin with, there is a certain kind of shrewdness to be admired in Kylie leveraging her fame.
In three years Kylie Jenner has turned what was a $250,000 investment of her own money (saved up from modeling gigs) into a full scale business that employs 12 people under her direct command (seven full-time and five part-time) as well as engages a packaging group in Oxnard, California and the online retailer Shopify, both of which create a number of ancillary jobs that are not immediately associated with, yet still very much attributable to, Ms. Kylie Jenner.
While she herself may be worth almost $1 billion, there have also been countless millions of dollars in secondary and even tertiary impact across the United States in regard to her company.
That's the economic impact you can't deny.
In all honesty, when I first read this story on CNN, I sort of shrugged it off. Another Kardashian or Jenner in the headlines; what else is new? Especially with the story centered around her making money, I initially scoffed because of the sheer amount of money the family already possesses.
And yet, there is some such something incredibly insightful about what Kylie Jenner has done. Using her very self as an extension (and truly core whole) of her brand, Kylie has built up a loyal fan base that she can contact en masse, at the click of a button. Like any good entrepreneur, she has utilized the best technologies of her time to develop something that people didn't even know they needed yet, and then served it up to us on a silver platter.
However, Forbes is quick to point out that it's possible that the extensive growth that Kylie Jenner's company has seen in its brief existence is not sustainable, and already in 2017 there were signs that sales were slowing. It's very possible that after toying with this project for a time, Kylie might eventually grow tired of spinning makeup into gold and move onto something bigger and better, especially if the same kind of rapid success she's seen in years past with Kylie Cosmetics isn't readily available again going forward. After all, business savvy doesn't inherently include a hardnosed, drop-till-you-die mentality (though I'm sure that helps long-term gains).
There are in fact folks who get rich quick. And for Kylie, that rich has been very quick.
What Forbes fails to touch on, however, is the interminability of the internalized brand. I think everyone engaged in social media on some level understands this idea, but it is much more apparent in an individual like Kylie Jenner who has a much farther-reaching base than someone like me does.
Kylie Cosmetics, in a loose sense of things, isn't actually about the cosmetics. It's about Kylie, the fans she has, and what they're willing to do for her, including giving her money so they can cash in on the exclusivity of owning a piece of that internalized brand and, in the end, wear it on their face.
In an economic sense, the story of Kylie Jenner provides some important lessons, among them being that the wealthy are (often) not some far offset of feudal lords who take from a system without ever contributing to its dynamism. Kylie Jenner may have been born to a well-to-do family, yet there is a large swath of money to her name that is of her own making and a trail of trickled down economic benefits for others that also have her hand in them.
Another of these lessons being that it is (usually) not as if the wealthy have tricked or coerced their way to their fortune, but rather through a combination of opportunity, intelligence, and in many instances just plain dumb luck, that such gains are begotten. So it is observable with Kylie, whose use of social media platforms and personalized branding have capitalized on key cornerstones of the Information Age to produce wealth.
No one was told to buy her makeup at gunpoint, after all.
Ultimately, that's not to say that these situations (economics in particular, though the social implications of a 20-year-old, billionaire, Instagram mogul bears worth investigating too) are not nuanced ones that don't deserve ample looking into. Income inequality at incredibly disproportionate levels remains a problem not only in America but around the world. And yet, to focus solely on that is to discredit the success that Kylie Jenner and others like her, famous or not, have achieved and continue to achieve.
Seeing the Kardashians as only thick bimbos who have no presence of note is a faulty vantage point. They are, in their way, intelligent. Deliberate. And to a certain extent, cunning. They know what they've created and, what's more, they know how to control it masterfully.
While the Kardashian entity is certainly crass in content it is also admirable in perseverance, far from vapid in approach, and, if the clan has any say-so, the farthest thing from a flash in a pan that you might find.
