At the 2022 Met Gala, per usual, Kim Kardashian caused quite a stir. Not only did she show up with her new beau, Pete “BDE” Davidson, but she also revealed to the press that she had to lose 16 pounds in three weeks in order to fit into the gown that evening. It was Marilyn Monroe’s iconic 1962 dress that she wore while singing for JFK. (The outfit was a loaner from the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum, who stipulated that Kardashian couldn’t make any alterations to the historical piece.) Both spectators online and a notable Riverdale star took issue at the time with the reality star seemingly touting a rapid weight loss regime to the public. She’s addressing the criticisms now – and it's not exactly a mea culpa.
Amidst a profile about her new skin care line for the New York Times, the 41-year-old mother of four explained that she approached wearing the dress as though it were a film role of sorts. She hinted at Christian Bale’s 62-pound transformation for his part in The Machinist and how Renee Zellweger famously had to gain weight for Bridget Jones’s Diary. I guess in her view, she was stepping into Marilyn Monroe’s shoes in an authentic way, not simply for the red carpet snaps during the Met Gala’s American Anthology of Fashion theme this year. Specifically, she said to the outlet:
To me it was like, 'OK, Christian Bale can do it for a movie role and that is acceptable.’ Even Renée Zellweger gained weight for a role. It's all the same to me. I wasn’t saying, 'Hey everyone, why don’t you go lose this weight in a short period of time?'
We all know actors sometimes take on major physical changes for the sake of their characters. Ben Foster himself just unveiled a 60-pound deficit for his upcoming role as a Holocaust survivor. But that doesn’t make the endeavor any less controversial. Anne Hathaway once said that losing 25 pounds for Les Misérables in just two weeks made her sick for a “really long time.” Likewise, in 2019, Christian Bale had just come off gaining nearly 50 pounds to portray Dick Cheney in the film Vice, and he admitted that his constant weight fluctuations were no longer the best way to prepare for a role.
Truth be told, Kim Kardashian isn’t actually an actress, so she doesn’t technically need to lose a ton of weight for a Met Gala “role,” since it is just an event after all. However, it’s clear that she still considers her public persona to be a role in and of itself – one that she’s played up to jaw-dropping effect before on her social media accounts.
The argument from Riverdale’s Lili Reinhart, though, was that the fans who look up to the TV personality would be potentially buying into “starving” themselves. The Kardashian-Jenners have long been criticized over this point – promoting unrealistic body standards to the masses – in the past. But it’s not the only thing they can catch flak for. Kim and her family in fact caught major backlash just ahead of The Kardashians’ season premiere (streaming now with a Hulu subscription) when she had appeared to diss the work ethic of women in business to the press.
And her now comparing herself to how Academy Award-winning actors and actresses suffer for their art may not go over well in the long run, either. That is, unless you believe what Kim Kardashian does is an art form, too.
