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<\/p>\n\n\tOne day in early February 2022, I was hanging out at Kim\u2019s office as she tried to cram two cover shoots into one day. Between the shoots, Kim was back in her glam room, getting RE-glammed with different hair and new makeup, this time to shoot the cover of Vogue Hong Kong. Kim was effusive and bossy, running her multibillion-dollar business in a bathrobe, two gay men pulling at her hair and face. At one point, as she was helped into and then out of a complicated, totally sheer Schiaparelli tulle dress \u2014 it was pretty much nothing but scaffolding \u2014 I looked up from my phone and she was entirely naked. Neither of us flinched. Lately, she and I had been playing a little game of \u201cGuess What Happened in 1995?\u201d because we kept being surprised by the astonishing number of cultural and technological shifts \u2014 to say nothing of her own complicated personal circumstances \u2014 that unfolded in that one year. Once she was dressed and sitting back in her chair, I said to Kim, \u201cYou know what else happened in 1995?\u201d She looked at me expectantly. The movie Clueless came out (her favorite film). When it was first released, Kim and her father (and a group of Kim\u2019s friends and their fathers) all went to see it together. \u201cWe were dying at every reference,\u201d she told me. \u201cIt was so me in high school. \u2026 I had pretty much every outfit that the girls wore in Clueless. \u2026 I was still into Contempo Casuals and shopping at Judy\u2019s at the Century City Mall. \u2026 Like, when I saw that movie, I couldn\u2019t believe it. Clueless is still, to this day, my favorite movie. It really resonated.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tClueless, inspired by Jane Austen\u2019s Emma, stars Alicia Silverstone as Cher Horowitz, a ditzy but well-meaning rich girl living in the ultraprivileged bubble of her Beverly Hills high school. \u201cI just wanted this fake world that you would see in a comedy of manners about the turn of the century,\u201d director Amy Heckerling said in an interview, adding, \u201cPositivity fascinates me \u2014 I don\u2019t understand it \u2026 so I started to think about a character that would be so happy and sure things would work out.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tA character like Kim.<\/p>\n
\n\tClueless was written and directed in 1994, right as Kim was entering her freshman year at Marymount High School, and right as her family was becoming a fixture in the inescapable O.J. Simpson news cycle. Heckerling\u2019s highly tuned antennae capture such a specific moment of Beverly Hills youth culture; it\u2019s hard to believe something of Kim\u2019s life wasn\u2019t absorbed from the ether. Cher goes to the mall and shops at Contempo Casuals and Fred Segal. She is obsessed with her closet, the organization of which puts even Kim to shame. Cher\u2019s iconic yellow plaid outfit evoked Kim\u2019s Catholic school girl uniform as imagined by Donatella Versace. Kim and Kourtney and their friends carpooled to school, blasting hip-hop in a white BMW, while Cher drives her friends in a white Jeep Wrangler. Cher famously volunteers to be \u201ccaptain of the Pismo Beach disaster relief\u201d effort, while Kim spent Coastal Cleanup Day scouring the Santa Monica beaches for trash. All of the scenes in the ostentatiously enormous house where Cher lives with her strict, attorney father (who happens to look exactly like O.J. lawyer Robert Shapiro) were shot in a 10,000-square-foot house in Encino, just down the road from Robert Kardashian\u2019s 11,000-square-foot former home on Mandalay Drive, which, much like the fictional Horowitz residence, features a grand double staircase. As their homes become the prep site for a big trial, Kim and Cher both take an interest in their father\u2019s legal work. Ripped straight from the headlines, Cher calls her brother-in-law Josh a \u201cKato\u201d \u2014 as in Kato Kaelin, one of the minor witnesses in the O.J. trial \u2014 meaning \u201cfreeloader.\u201d<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tAmy Heckerling\u2019s 1995 hit Clueless, starring Stacey Dash (left) and Alicia Silverstone, is
Kardashian\u2019s favorite film: \u201cIt was so me in high school. \u2026 I had pretty much every outfit that the girls wore in it. I was still into Contempo Casuals and shopping at Judy\u2019s at the Century City Mall.\u201d<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\u00a9Paramount\/Courtesy Everett Collection<\/p>\n
\n\tMuch of the infamous slang from the film \u2014 the texture that provides the crackling authenticity \u2014 came from Heckerling\u2019s impeccable ear for the way people really talk (gay men, stoners, rappers), but there was another source, one with surprising proximity to Kim. \u201cI have to give props to the UCLA linguistics department,\u201d said Heckerling. \u201cThey published a list of slang words and phrases, and Monet came from that.\u201d (As Cher explains to Dionne: \u201cShe\u2019s a full-on Monet. It\u2019s like a painting, see? From far away it\u2019s OK, but up close it\u2019s a big ol\u2019 mess.\u201d) You could literally throw a rock from Kim\u2019s high school parking lot at Marymount across Sunset and it would land on the UCLA campus. Seniors at Marymount often walked over to hang out in the quad. All of which is to say, some of the \u201990s slang collected by the students at UCLA may very well have been uttered by Marymount students.<\/p>\n
\n\tIn Kim\u2019s glam room, as she was explaining why Clueless is her favorite movie \u2014 indeed, the impact it had on her teenage years \u2014 she said, \u201cAnd that\u2019s the reason I bought my Monet.\u201d I stared at her and blinked a couple of times. \u201cThe first real piece of art that I bought \u2014 myself \u2014 was a Monet. Because in the movie they called the girls \u2018a Monet\u2019 if they look good from afar, but up close they\u2019re just a mess.\u201d I was still staring and blinking, trying not to let on how extravagantly implausible this sounded. Kim bought a Monet not because she had visited the famous Water Lilies at l\u2019Orangerie in Paris or under the art world tutelage of Kanye West. She bought a Monet for the same reason she kept the box of chicken McNuggets from her first date with TJ Jackson \u2014 a piece of high school nostalgia.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tA sketch of Kardashian\u2019s Tadao Ando-designed concrete house in Palm Springs on her Instagram.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t@kimkardashian\/Instagram<\/p>\n
\n\tShe continued: \u201cI was in Italy, and it was being auctioned, and I was with Kim Jones [creative director of Fendi], and we were doing our Fendi\/Skims fitting in Rome. I really wanted this Monet painting because it\u2019s a gray Monet \u2014 a pretty landscape, but gray. \u2026 I really wanted it for my Tadao Ando house in Palm Springs, which is all concrete. And I\u2019m bidding and I\u2019m bidding, and it was the first auction that I ever did, so I didn\u2019t really know how they worked. But you get really into it. So Kim Jones is there with me and he\u2019s like, \u201cGET IT!\u201d So I bid on it. I win. And I went over what my budget was because you\u2019re in the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tAnd then, in true Cher Horowitz fashion, a blunder straight out of a comedy of manners: \u201cSo, I got it. It\u2019s delivered. And it\u2019s like \u2026 THIS big. Like, a postcard. I didn\u2019t think to check the dimensions! I thought it was going to cover a whole wall! I\u2019m going to put it in my Ando when it\u2019s done,\u201d she says, laughing. \u201cLike in the powder room.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tExcerpted from Citizen Kim by Jonathan Van Meter. Copyright 2026. Reprinted by permission of Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House, LLC.<\/p>\n