Kim Kardashian has been a staple at the Met Gala for the past 13 years. After failing to make the notoriously scrupulous cut to walk the red carpet at fashion’s annual biggest night out before 2013, according to a new story in The Cut, the tabloid-staple reality TV star finally got her shot to strut along A-listers thanks to a personal plea from ex-husband Ye (formerly known as Kanye West).
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The story reports that in 2012, Ye tried to get his then-new girlfriend Kardashian into the Ball to no avail, according to writer Jonathan Van Meter, whose biography Citizen Kim: The Woman Who Created the Future (Oct. 27) is excerpted in the Cut piece. Van Meter reported being in meetings at the Vogue offices when he described the magazine’s former longtime editor and chairperson of the Gala Anna Wintour’s eyes “roll[ing] nearly all the way up into the back of her head at the mere mention of the Kardashians.”
But even though Ye was booked to perform at the 2013 Gala, Kardashian was still persona non grata to Wintour and not officially invited, though the famously brusque Gala boss allowed her to attend as the rapper’s plus-one. Kardashian, then eight months pregnant with the couple’s first child, daughter North West, made a splash in a skintight floral Givenchy dress with matching gloves and shoes that made her look “upholstered like a sofa,” as Van Meter said one fashion critic wrote at the time.
As with so many things Kardashian does, the appearance generated massive press attention and more social media mentions than anyone in the event’s history, according to Van Meter. “While the laypeople of social media saw the dress as a faux pas — another opportunity to mock Kim — many fashion people were smitten with the bravery of pulling off something so risky: a look that amounted to a modern, perverse take on a dowdy ensemble Queen Elizabeth might have worn,” he wrote.
And though Wintour had turned her nose up at Kardashian initially, Van Meter said the indisputable flood of attention her appearance generated at a time when fashion and media were evolving minute-by-minute and Kim’s social media following was approaching previously unimaginable heights, made her subsequent invites every year since a no-brainer.
“The fashion world didn’t accept her until she went to the Met Ball with him. Kanye called Wintour, that was all him, because he saw the version of her that we see,” Kardashian’s friend, Tracy Romulus, told Van Meter. “He believed in her. He saw the beauty, he saw the elegance … where he was just, like, ‘No. She’s not just a reality-TV star. She’s beautiful, she’s amazing, she’s relevant; every designer should be dressing her.’ He fought for Kim’s place there.”
Ye and Kardashian were married in 2014 and divorced in 2022; the former couple share four children: North, Saint, Chicago and Psalm. In the years since Kim’s Met Gala debut, her sisters, model Kendall Jenner and beauty mogul Kylie Jenner, mother Kris Jenner, and sisters Kourtney and Khloé have also attended the event.
