If anyone can be said to embody the American Dream, it’s Kim
Kardashian West.
It’s almost hard to remember a time before she and her
sprawling mega-family—mother
Kris Jenner and ex-stepfather, Olympic
champion Caitlyn (née Bruce) Jenner, sisters Kourtney and Khloé,
half-sisters Kendall and Kylie, brother Rob, and various friends,
husbands, boyfriends, and exes—invented a new kind of tabloid fame, one
based on access rather than aspiration. 
Back in 2007 the affluent
Kardashian-Jenner clan was known mostly for their patriarch, a
gold-medal-winning decathlete, and for Kardashian West’s late father,
the businessman and attorney Robert Kardashian, who served on the
defense team at the O.J. Simpson murder trial. Kardashian West popped up
as a member of Paris Hilton’s entourage on the hotel heiress’s reality
series The Simple Life. But then, of course, Kardashian West and her mom took a gamble with an E! docuseries, and the rest is history.
A decade into Keeping Up With the Kardashians, the show has evolved from covering Brady Bunch
antics and innocuous drama to serving as a rooted-in-real-life mirror
to what the American family looks like today, bringing up topics such as
race, gender, and, more recently, trans identity. Kardashian West, now
36, has grown up in front of the camera, getting remarried, divorced,
remarried again (to rapper Kanye West), and having two children, North
and Saint West. (It has been reported that the couple is expecting a
third child via surrogate.)
Kardashian West has, in the process, built
an extremely lucrative personal brand, listed by Forbes as earning over
$45 million a year, based entirely on being herself.
Though critics continue to scoff at how Kardashian West originally
clinched her notoriety (by now, we all know the origin story), she’s
laughing all the way to the bank. There is her Kim Kardashian West
Official App; the mobile game Kim Kardashian: Hollywood; and Kimoji (a
set of Kim-themed emojis and GIFs that expanded into physical products).
There are her modeling campaigns for brands such as Balmain, and her
role as the perma-muse for her husband’s fashion line, Yeezy.
There’s
her newly launched cosmetics line, KKW Beauty, which sold out its first
wave of contour and highlighting kits in less than three hours, and a
fragrance, slated for release next month. And then, of course, there is
the never-ending fascination—fed via Instagram, Twitter, and
Snapchat—with her bronzed, impossible beauty. As Kardashian West herself
says in conversation with Janet Mock, “Not bad for a girl with no
talent.” Kardashian West recently got on the phone with the writer,
journalist, and trans rights advocate to discuss what it’s really like
to be the most famous woman in the world.
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