Writing about pop culture today means keeping up with the Kardashians is mandatory. Their presence has long created a cacophony of online discourse; however, very few commentators have offered much serious analysis. Enter @KardashianKolloquium, run by MJ Corey, with hundreds of thousands of followers across TikTok and Instagram.
MJ Corey is a Brooklyn-based psychotherapist and writer, best known for her dissections of the Kardashians, reality television, TikTok and other pop culture phenomena. Her debut book, Dekonstructing the Kardashians, is described as part media theory, part cultural analysis, as it explores America's most famous family.
I first came across this TikTok account in 2022, while engaged in my own journalistic speculations about the Kardashians. I quickly realised the account was a mine of detailed, sharp analysis. Kardashian Kolloquium is distinct in part because MJ is not fuelled by personal standom or outrage towards the Kardashians at all. She has a distant, dispassionate lens on the family empire, allowing her to critically analyse it.
Whenever I take a cursory glance at her comment sections, the same question normally crops up: “Why focus on them?” Many online detractors of the Kar-Jenners find it hard to understand why we should take what they deem as a superficial, controversial, talentless crop of people seriously. “I view them as no different from WWE, Las Vegas, the Disney brand or any of these other classic American iconic corporate conglomerates that have shaped America,” she tells me during a whirlwind conversation over Zoom. “I think I actually would be equally happy unpacking any of those, I find it all fascinating…how something becomes iconic and then can become institutionalised in our culture”. MJ deals with detractors with good humour, saying, “People do react strongly to my work sometimes, but that's been its own fun journey for me as a writer.”
And a journey it has been. “I was really late to the Kardashians,” MJ explains. “I didn’t care to keep up, I even had a sort of ambivalence then about them.” The turning point came when she caught the infamous Bora Bora episode where Kim loses her diamond earring in the ocean, and she noticed how well the episodes were narrativised. “They were following a perfect A plot, B plot, C plot structure,” mirroring TV writing perfectly. “I called my sister, and I said, ‘Oh my God, the show is actually weird and really interesting.’ It was really staged, but really real too.”
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Her sister, who was studying media at the time, encouraged her to read French media theory. “I was also training to be a therapist, and I was deep in that work. It's like my calling to be a therapist, but I was having fun on the side, studying this new form of theory that I didn't really know much about before, and watching Keeping Up With The Kardashians. I documented this self-study on Instagram, and then it kind of just built from there.”
Eight years of study later, including essays in Vogue, Refinery29, and Paper Magazine, to name a few, has resulted in her first book, Dekonstructing The Kardashians, a formidable chronicle of the First Family of reality TV, examining everything from old Hollywood to the MAGA movement to aid its reader in demystifying a lot of what feels strange, compelling, and confusing about our media landscape.
The first half of the book focuses on a variety of icons and the ways the Kar-Jenners have synthesised our deep nostalgia and love of current trends to remain relevant. Kim Kardashian, MJ argues, is never just one thing, quoting Kim once saying, “Honey, I'm the Jackie and the Marilyn,” despite Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe famously being two opposing female figures.
“In the 2020s, it became really clear that Kim's agenda has always been to make these references, to dress up as other icons and layer her TV show and its narratives with history, imagery and all these other things all at once.” Case in point: Kim wearing ‘The Marilyn Dress’ at the 2022 Met Gala, much to the public's outrage. Kim has also dressed up as Princess Jasmine around a dozen times, and even evoked her former socialite rival, Paris Hilton.
Sex sells? Only when it's dressed to be illegal.
MJ compares Kim with the hit millennial media platform Buzzfeed, whose founder “seemed to really understand the need to organise and make coherent, this sea of imagery that the internet was starting to become. Buzzfeed became this order out of chaos, making listicles that organised all this different imagery and these ideas out there into nice, clean, fun, consumable packages like lists and personality quizzes that really spoke to our egos.” There is a relationship between Kim Kardashian and the Buzzfeed logic: “Her body became this useful medium to reflect all of the stuff that was out there.” In other words, Kim is a human algorithm offering almost anything and everything after gauging our tastes.
The world we live in now feels very different to the one the Kar-Jenners first emerged from, especially politically. In 2007, it was just before the start of the Obama administration, which precipitated a more multiracial America, which the Kardashians' multi-ethnic family paralleled. Fast forward to 2026, and we are firmly in Trump’s America; MJ thinks they have adapted well to the Trump era. “They did keep their infamous BBLs,” which are often associated with being racially different, and I think it's in part because at this point Kim's butt is like her Mickey Mouse ears, it's a crucial semiotic for the Kardashians.” MJ notes that despite this, "They did get much thinner, they were going blonde more often. It was a thermometer for what was changing in the moment.”
Kim and Trump may not be so different. MJ says, “A lot of the same principles that allowed the Kardashians to come up can be traced to Donald Trump's ascendance. I look in the book at how Kim and Trump both made appearances in WWE, reflecting a willingness to embrace any kind of venue to reach more people.” She also adds that they both are “distilling their messages in simplistic, repetitive ways and telling stories using images so it gets maximum reach to all kinds of consumers and audiences. I think they speak the same language.” The family is associated with both Republicans and Democrats. “They also don't really hide the fact that Thrive Capital is funding SKIMS, which is owned by Joshua Kushner, husband of Ivanka Trump… I think they are very comfortable in Trump’s America.”
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One of the Kar-Jenners’ most controversial associations that has dogged them is cultural appropriation. I’ve reflected a lot on race in popular culture since this issue first came to the fore, and Dekonstructing The Kardashians presents useful perspectives on this long-talked-about issue. The Kar-Jenners “incite in us this task to figure out where our lines are morally, around race, class and sexuality.”
MJ spoke to academic Sarah Gotieri, who argues that “with Middle Eastern identity, it's really hard to know where the lines are between the poles of white and black or white and brown.” Kim, in particular, has ethnic ambiguity, which means she is both able to be a racial outsider (she was cruelly referred to as “Jafar” in contrast to the WASPY blonde Paris Hilton) and a white woman who has utilised black culture to the tune of millions. MJ points out that the US has a long history of attempting to categorise people racially, “and it often ends up referring to the court system or even eugenics science” in an attempt to do so.
One cultural appropriation incident that looms large was Kim’s 2018 Fulani braids, which she renamed “Bo Derek braids.” MJ mentions that in the 1980s, a black female American Airlines employee named Renee Roger was fired for her Fulani braids by her employer. When she took them to court, they concluded that it was not discriminatory because “the hairstyle…had no real significance to black culture, given it had recently been worn by the white actress Bo Derek in the movie 10. So Kim, citing Bo Derek, refers right back to this landmark case.” Kim has since gone on to work in criminal justice reform and is still studying to become a lawyer. “In the book, I do wonder if she ever came across that case.”
And while Kim may be the centrepiece of the Kar-Jenner empire, all the family have a part to play in the success of this American conglomerate. Dekonstructing The Kardashians argues that the family followed in the footsteps of iconic British girl group The Spice Girls. “They really make a great caricature of performing their archetypes.” Famously, each Spice Girl has their own specific personality type. MJ explains how historically, “Girl groups were more uniform and they were not as archetypal. They were more collective. But with separate archetypes, there's something about us that is drawn to seeing information organised in a coherent way.”
In a world where there is actually too much information, it's almost a relief to see some of it neatly categorised in a way that makes sense. Who doesn’t love deciding which Sex And The City character they are most like? The Kar-Jenners have essentially mastered this instinct, with each sister occupying a distinct personality archetype: Kourtney as the “natural one,” Kris Jenner as the “momager,” Khloé as the “funny one,” Kylie as the “glamour girl,” and so on. The ability to provide defined archetypes is actually just good business.
The Kardashians live well beyond just our TV screens; they are a ubiquitous part of online culture. “A great example of an early Kardashian meme is the Kim couch dress meme from the 2013 Met Gala. That was a peak year of memes; they were really a part of what it meant to be on Instagram at the time. The image was perfect for the micro-square meme format, and it was everywhere. Wide distribution of imagery in the form of memes was kind of the name of the game on the internet, and it was free marketing for Kim.” It circulated so widely in part to make fun of Kim’s appearance on the red carpet, but MJ argues that ultimately, Kim has gotten the last laugh. “It's a great example of how making fun of the Kardashians might feel like a way for the public to reclaim some power over the fact that the Kardashians were everywhere, but it only helped them.” They also seem intentional in the generation of memes, with a recent example being Kendall cutting a cucumber in a bizarre manner that went viral.
Their utilisation of memes reflects a deep understanding of the power of the image that Kim seems to have adopted with her clothing line SKIMS, which is known for using famous stars of the moment, such as two breakout actors of The White Lotus or England football player Jude Bellingham during the 2024 Euros. The brand mimics and draws on what's of interest like an algorithm, trying to feed us what we want. MJ tells me the volunteer group she created, called the Kardashian Data Coalition, which aimed to collect data about the family, had found that SKIMS “really only have a few of the same core pieces of clothing, but then it has a rapid turnover of images.” MJ argues convincingly that the images “are really representing only a few kinds of styles of fabric,” but the people styled in them change rapidly.
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The Kar-Jenners seem to have built their fame almost more on being hated than on being loved. Dekonstructing The Kardashians reminds its readers that many of the beloved female icons it references (Marilyn Monroe, The Spice Girls) faced criticism and were far from universally adored during their day. I was interested in finding out whether the Kar-Jenners are on the same trajectory. “I think they’ll be remembered more like a Marie Antoinette figure, where with history we can say these were the harms they caused, but I think there will be a softer lens and an admission that they made history in certain ways,” MJ surmises. Distance could mean that we eventually see them as important late-capitalist postmodern figures.
It’s curious that, unlike the Kardashians, MJ doesn’t appear to actively seek the limelight. She’s known publicly only by her initials and seems keen to avoid reshaping herself to fit whatever social media algorithms — which can change on a whim — happen to reward at any given moment.
“I know I have to use the media as a tool to get my ideas out there as a writer, but it's this catch-22 because I'm feeling more and more ambivalent of media itself, social media especially,” MJ explains.
It's clear she wants her work to be taken seriously and be at the forefront, rather than be some sort of media personality that social media often encourages its users to become. “My hope with this book is that I inspire people to consume media more actively rather than passively,” she concludes. The tools she references in the book have already helped me make sense of our wild media landscape. I think before we can hope to reshape the culture around us, we have to understand it. Dekonstructing The Kardashians is a very compelling place to start.
