The Kardashian-fication of History
Nervous People Read History
(Apologies for the delay in getting this piece out. I became too infatuated with a newfound television show.)
I promise that in the future I will not start each post with it being the “-fication” of something, but this came to me on a recent walk while listening to a podcast.
It should be noted that I have been “off of” podcasts for a bit and instead moved in favor of audiobooks to try to reach my Goodreads goal. But when the app wasn’t working, I tuned into an old episode of “Keep It” which you probably know from the Snapchat homepage.
In this episode, Louis Virtel (former Jeopardy! star who once said he made a journey to “Trebekistan”) and Ira Madison III talked about that Marilyn Monroe dress and its recent appearance at Anna Wintour’s event back in May.
In case you’ve been off the grid and not Very Online like myself, the Monroe dress that they referenced is the “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” dress that she wore in 1962 at a fundraiser for President Kennedy prior to his birthday. By that exaction, it is very old and very valuable. Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum gifted it to Kim Kardashian for the 2022 MET Gala (which was now a very long time ago in Internet Time). The dress has over 2,000 rhinestones on it and was made by a fresh-out-of-college Bob Mackie. Monroe had to be sewn into the tight dress before she stepped on stage at Madison Square Garden.
The reason the dress was making headlines so long after the MET Gala? The internet recently learned that the dress was damaged. Rhinestones were falling off left and right. This irreplaceable dress was damaged merely for a red carpet. But now the New York Times is reporting that (believe it or not!) the dress was not damaged. Kardashian says the same thing and claims that she probably was only wearing the dress for “three minutes.” But I’m not really focused on whether or not the dress was damaged.
To be honest with you, my fashion knowledge is minimal at best, but my historical knowledge is—according to my brand new degree—not bad. So, I took to heart what Louis and Ira said. They made the point that everyone had forgotten that this dress even existed! AND this was not even Marilyn Monroe’s most iconic dress. Those honors belong to the Gentlemen Prefer Blondes magenta stunner and the Seven Year Itch white dress. But this dress has suddenly taken up the free space in the heads of doomscrollers anxious for some more “trivial” content. (Also, as they said, not to mention that this dress is really only famous because of its relation to a man who was the most powerful man in the world at the time. This is totally independent of Monroe’s actual box-office success.)
So these are the two reasons that we learn history beyond the classroom:
For me, this actually the entire recreational purpose of my (aforementioned brand new) degree. This is about the narratives that we create about history. We, in this really really stressful world, want something to cling to, but we want it only when it is reference to something we are facing. We want someone to blame.
There are so many terrible things going on in the world today that Kim Kardashian and this dress snafu is a sort of allowance for us—the Twitter users—to get upset about that aforementioned “trivial” content.
But it isn’t only when we want someone to blame that we remember history. Do you recall those harrowing weeks in March 2020 when suddenly there were 5,046 new articles about the 1918 pandemic? We want to remember that we were not the first people to experience a particular moment in history. It feels very two-roads-diverged-in-a-yellow-wood. We want those road that has been trodden before. It’s a sort of reassurance that we are not the Very First people to go through something. The boat has struck the iceberg before. The economy crashed once, twice, three times before. The cat returned home. We want reassurance about the big things and the little things. We sometimes forget that humans are simulatenously very strong and very fragile.
I think that this is especially notable while it seems that the world is falling apart at the seams. Sometimes I’m in awe of the fact that we, as a society, have not yet crumbled under the weight of constant disaster.
This long soliliquoy about an old dress is merely to say that we can care about history even when we aren’t trying to remind ourselves that we’ve been here before and know the way out. (Ugh, my favorite The West Wing quote.) You can watch that documentary without it being related to Kim Kardashian or a safeguard to remind ourselves that there has been a pandemic before.
Learn history without it being in pursuit of comfort or in research to get back at someone else on the internet. History should make you uncomfortable. It should make you reconsider your own perspecctives. If you learn something that reminds you that we have faced this exact issue before, fantastic! If it gives you context for the latest celebrity scandal, wonderful. But learn history for yourself. It’s actually really fun and really sad sometimes and really happy sometimes and always really wonderful to look back.
As for my ever-present literary spin, read any of Erik Larson’s books or any of Bryan Burroughs because they are incredibly informative without being dry. History is always directly applicable to the situation beyond safeguards and ridiculing celebrity.
Oh, and it should be noted that while we are on the topic of history. Kim Kardashian was not on theme with the Gilded Age at the MET Gala. The Gilded Age did not last until the 1960s. I’ll always be happy to act as a historical consultant at the MET Gala.