Oh, to be a fly on the wall of Kim Kardashian's office when the SKIMS founder and mom of four decided that a 90°F afternoon was the ideal time to wear a skin-tight Balenciaga dress to get lensed for a staged paparazzi photoshoot. The location? A gas station, of course.
Let's face facts: plenty of paparazzi photos are engineered. Celebs or their PR reps arrange for shutterbugs to be at certain places at certain times so that the famous folks can dictate the terms of their candid publicity and paparazzi get pictures that they sell to outlets to make a living. Win-win.
There are indeed lots of candid snaps taken without celebrity awareness but, especially if the subject is impeccably groomed and costumed, it's usually quite easy to tell the difference.
On September 2, Kim Kardashian was photographed looking perfectly pristine in a sheer Balenciaga dress that hugged her arms, torso, and jutting hips, draping all the way down to her black heeled boots.
Remember, it was a suffocating 90 degrees in LA. Normal people were wearing T-shirts and shorts, even if they were in their cars the entire time.
But Kim wasn't in her car, a suspiciously old Land Rover (more on this in a sec). She had stepped out, seemingly to "pump gas" — because the Kardashians are definitely putting on their faces, primping their hair, and squeezing into form-fitting sheer Balenciaga to fill up an SUV at a public gas station.
Kim admittedly may not even be trying to fool anyone about the authenticity of her paparazzi pics but no one on social media was taken in, either way.
In fact, more folks on Twitter were caught up in debate over whether the shapely figure in the images was even Kim at all, pointing to the face-obscuring sunglasses and older Land Rover model as evidence that it was a stand-in, as if Kim has anything else to do besides get her photo taken for free exposure.
There was even a rampant debate over whether Kim was "mocking poor people" by staging the ad-lib shoot at a gas station.
Now, Kim has said plenty of dimwitted things in her time and often gets (deservingly) clowned on for similar hijinks but, even considering how distanced these billionaires are from the real world, the accusations are a bit of a stretch, not unlike the recent YEEZY GAP drama.
So she wore expensive clothes to take photos in a dingy gas station, an environment that's probably as foreign to her as her swimming pool. Meh.
Is Kim's little gas station photoshoot goofy? Totally. Offense? Only in terms of good taste.
Kim is presumably taking a bit of a victory lap having recently starred in Balenciaga's Winter 2022 campaign and enjoyed a successful launch for her Beats collab.
Unfortunately, she's also weathering another random social media firestorm kicked up by ex-husband Kanye West, who ranted about "cum donors," his kids, and business associates like GAP on Instagram the same day as Kim's gas station editorial.
Nearly all of the posts have been deleted, as usual, but rest assured that it was as typically comprehendible as Kanye's other rants, which is to say not at all.
Maybe Kim figured that a scorching-hot photoshoot, temperature-wise, was what she needed to clear her head.
I'm having a hard time believing that there's another reason she inexplicably layered up in boiling heat at a gas station.
