Khloé Kardashian: ‘I hated shopping with my sisters’
In an exclusive interview, Khloé Kardashian opens up about her famous family, ignoring the critics — and how her battles with body-image have shaped her parenting.
Stellar
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Nothing about Khloé Kardashian’s life is normal.
After more than a decade as one of the most recognisable faces — with one of the most famous surnames — on the planet, the 34-year-old reality TV star-cum-businesswoman all but shrugs off the fact that every aspect of her life is magnified to an unthinkable level.
“I’m so used to being public that it doesn’t really bother me,” Kardashian tells Stellar from her home in Los Angeles. “I’m just so comfortable having everyone along for the ride.”
Her famous — and famously close — family put her in good stead. Case in point: the sprawling WhatsApp group chat she maintains with matriarch Kris Jenner, sisters Kim, Kourtney, Kendall and Kylie, and their brother Rob.
“Our family group chats are very wild,” she says. “We have ones where, if we’re talking about certain sisters, we eliminate that sister. We have got in trouble and used the wrong group chat before, and that’s never good.”
If a brood of six can keep Kardashian on her toes, it is little wonder she has learnt to turn a selectively blind eye to what her social media connections are saying at any given moment; at last check, she boasted more than 131 million followers.
“I forget that millions of people are looking. I see if my friends comment, but I don’t get notifications when everyone else does. And I don’t really read through my comments — because that could not be good for my self-esteem.”
The Kardashians siblings have each other’s backs in a ride-or-die kind of fashion. Late last month Kardashian posted a series of selfies to Instagram in which she wore an olive-coloured cap with the slogan “Kanye For President” embroidered on it.
The usual headlines erupted, positing she had endorsed her controversial brother-in-law’s pledge to run for US President in 2024.
The reality, she explains, was far less exciting. “I have no idea who sent it to me; I just thought it was cute! It matched my outfit, so I put it on. I love my brother-in-law. Who cares? People create such a mountain out of nothing.”
Sometimes too, they create one out of truly gruelling personal trauma — and the Kardashians themselves help it all along.
Last April, towards the end of her first pregnancy, Kardashian was engulfed in a cheating scandal that involved her NBA star boyfriend Tristan Thompson, who also sired her then soon-to-be-born daughter True.
The fallout — including a tense delivery-room confrontation — was documented on camera for the family’s E! reality show Keeping Up With The Kardashians, which has blossomed from mid-noughties guilty pleasure into the foundation of a billion-dollar empire that encompasses the worlds of fashion, beauty, lifestyle, homewares, TV production and an endless supply of memes.
“There’s not too many things that are secret, I guess,” admits Kardashian. “I’m so used to being public that it doesn’t really bother me. It’s just who I am.”
Asked to consider how she figures out the balance between her public and private personas, she replies with a laugh, “Do I have a private persona?”
Kardashian seems acutely aware that for all the people who follow her family with intense fervour, just as many condemn them as the crass embodiment of narcissism run amok. Yet she’s learnt to stop being bothered by the latter.
“We’re not doing a movie role, we’re not portraying a character,” she says. “We’ve been doing this so long it’s just second nature. But you have to have a really thick skin. And I am so, so thankful for my family.
“No matter what people think of me, I know I’m a good person. If I stand true to that, and if other people see it... great. If not, it doesn’t really affect me. I have to be very understanding of that — but it took a lot of criticism to get to that peaceful place.”
Vogue Australia editor-in-chief Edwina McCann has featured Kim Kardashian on the cover twice, and sister Kylie’s first appearance last September resulted in the magazine’s fastest-selling issue ever.
She tells Stellar she believes the siblings are “hardworking businesswomen building personal empires that rival some of the biggest and oldest brands in the world. I have always found the Kardashian/Jenners to be polite and very professional. For a family who could buy almost anything they ever wanted, they all seem to possess an admirable work ethic.”
And despite the assumption they are prone to oversharing, there are still moments that remain off-limits to the camera crews.
“We definitely have things that stay private,” she tells Stellar. “Whether they be family dinners or holidays...”
The recent first birthday of her niece Stormi (Kylie’s daughter) was not filmed for Keeping Up With the Kardashians. Still, it is not always easy for her to avoid oversharing.
“It’s my biggest issue — it’s hard for me to pull back,” she says. “Everybody doesn’t have to know everything. My personal life, my dating life... I’ve learnt that I want to keep on the private side.”
This includes what — and how — she shares updates on her daughter. “I don’t want to overexpose her,” says Kardashian, whose volume of baby posts are, by Stellar’s quick and by no means mathematically perfect estimation, no higher than any other new parent’s.
What she would rather do is instil True with the same level of self-confidence her own parents gave her. “As silly as it sounds, I do positive affirmations with her in the morning. We sit in front of the mirror. It’s so corny: ‘I am beautiful!’
“I never, ever considered myself chubby or overweight,” she says of her own childhood.
“I didn’t know that I was until I went on TV, and everyone told me that I was ‘fat’. I never felt that way because my family never allowed me to. Anything about me that was positive, they would point out.
“It’s my job to make her feel, no matter what she looks like, that she is strong and confident and beautiful, and it’s OK to embrace all different shapes, sizes, and ethnicities. My whole family is a melting pot of race and skin tone and hair colour and height — everything. That’s our reality and our children need to know how beautiful diversity is.”
Kardashian describes her role as a mother “one of the best things ever — as soon as you see your baby it just gives you this surge of energy. I want her to be proud of me.”
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And having her own daughter has given her a newfound appreciation of the way her own mother handles the task.
“The way she’s able to juggle everything — all of her kids: managing them, loving them, her social life. My mum is 63 years old and what she manages to do inspires me. We all have the same amount of hours — somehow, she just uses them differently.”
Jenner has been a particularly strong role model for her daughter as she has launched her own companies.
“Business is definitely trial and error,” Kardashian says. “At the beginning I was bright-eyed and everything was exciting. I’ve learnt you have to believe in your brand. I’ve learnt it’s OK to say no — to understand that something else might come my way.
“It’s so much better when you can say no to 500 things and say yes to that one [project] that speaks to your soul.”
In 2016, Kardashian co-founded the size-inclusive clothing label Good American, which incorporates denim, activewear and shapewear from sizes 00 to 24.
Already, about 22 per cent of sales are generated in Australia; now the brand is launching exclusively online at The Iconic, which will also stock the line’s newly invented size 15 jeans.
“We don’t want to sell to retailers who aren’t going to carry the entire line right next to each other,” says Kardashian.
“Because I’m a tall girl, I’m a bigger girl. And I was always really embarrassed to go shopping with my sisters or my girlfriends. It’s what they say all girls love to do together — but for me, it was... ‘god, I have to shop.’
“I had to be embarrassed when they told me my size was on a different floor. You’re sent to the attic, basically, to shop for your size. It’s like, why do you do that to women? It doesn’t make you feel good. So if we’re able to help that at all, the more the merrier.”
Good American is now available at The Iconic; theiconic.com.au.
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Originally published as Khloé Kardashian: ‘I hated shopping with my sisters’
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