The beginning of the Kardashians' decline

From the stormy divorce between Kanye West and Kim to chatter about sudden weight loss and subsequent accusations about promoting diet culture, 2022 has been a complicated year for the Kardashian family. The sisters, led by Kris Jenner, continue to make billions of dollars with their respective brands in the fashion, beauty, and lifestyle sectors, but they certainly do not shine in terms of reputation, especially on TikTok. Compounded by the total change in the media landscape, the Kardashian-Jenners have particularly struggled to adapt to the generational shift on social, finding themselves in front of a new virtual audience that is not necessarily obsessed with Kim or Kendall's personal affairs.

Accomplice to a shift in social users' focus on more real content, the Kardashian-Jenner family has slowly lost its ability to dictate trends and tendencies. According to the Kardashian Data Koalition collective, which tracks and analyzes the social media impact of Kylie and her sisters' accounts, Kim Kardashian's posts lose effectiveness when switching from photo to video format - 3.2 M likes versus 1.2 M - confirming the sisters' incompatibility with this new, authentic and interactive world. Instead, videos denouncing the poor quality of Kylie Cosmetics products and exposing gossip around the family's affairs, including conspiracy theories such as the Kardashian Kurse, a curse according to which the family's witch ancestors had sold their souls to the devil to live beautiful and rich lives all the time, making their men damned as happened to Scott Disick, Travis Scott, and Kanye West, are depopulating on the platform.

In addition, the sisters' credibility thinned with their waistline, spelling the end of Kim, Kourtney, Khloe, Kylie except Kendall's relevance due to her merits on the catwalks. The family identified in the past as champions of inclusive body positivity in the late 1910s has been shown to have used the body as a means of conveying an aesthetic trend, again altering the silhouette with extreme gym sessions and probably surgeries to meet society's standards, which again glorify diet culture. Despite this, the family will not disappear from the spotlight because Kris Jenner has already begun maneuvering to make the empire survive. For all powerful families it is crucial to create a legacy to continue in business, and as it was for Kendall and Kylie who brought new life to Keeping Up With the Kardashians with their arrival on TV, today it is North, Stormi, and Saint who are the new faces the public looks to with curiosity on TikTok.

The trip to Italy but also the past fashion weeks have made official the interest regarding the second-generation Kardashian-Jenners, in fact North is already a fashion icon. On the video platform, the child posts content that entertains both younger and older audiences who are aware and curious about watching a video of Kim Kardashian's daughter. This factor enshrines the definitive departure from the Kardashian figure as icons to be imitated, and takes us to a new page in the media culture of the 2000s.