The issue ended up selling more than a million copies - 250,000 more than normal circulation. The titillation was purposeful: Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown, who would go on to serve as editor in chief of The New Yorker, made the decision to put the image on the cover, knowing how it would drive sales. She couldn’t imagine “why anyone would want to display her swollen stomach like that - and why people would want to look at it.” “It’s tacky,” one twenty-three-year-old woman told the Los Angeles Times. In some quarters, it was considered obscene: many supermarkets displayed it with the sort of paper wrap reserved for Playboy others, like Safeway and Giant, refused to sell it entirely. The cover became instantly iconic, mocked and replicated and spoofed in the manner of meme culture decades before online memes existed. If you were born after 1991, you’ve never known a time when pregnancy wasn’t performed in public: 1991 was the watershed year in which Demi Moore appeared naked, seven months pregnant with her second daughter, Scout, on the cover of Vanity Fair. But when her body refused to give her one, she became the unlikely means by which the cracks in the ideology of “good” maternity became visible. Kardashian wanted the cute little basketball bump. When she writes on her blog that “for me pregnancy is the worst experience of my life,” she’s not just “keeping it real,” as she proclaims at the beginning of the paragraph she’s working to mainstream the truly unruly idea that pregnancy - and, by extension, even motherhood - is not the pinnacle, or even defining purpose, of every woman’s life. Yet in transgressing the boundaries of the “cute celebrity pregnancy,” Kardashian effectively called attention to the constrictive, regressive norms of how women, celebrity or not, are now expected to “perform” pregnancy in public. The ultimate prize wasn’t just a picture of Kim, but one of Kim eating, Kim looking fat, Kim looking miserable, Kim looking uncomfortable, Kim looking, in other words, not like Kim: a betrayal of the image of celebrity maternity that, over the last ten years, has become the norm. From that point forward, the already Kardashian-frenzied paparazzi went into over‑drive. The photo wasn’t the first image of the pregnant Kardashian, but it became the indelible one, encapsulating all that was “wrong” with her pregnancy: her weight gain (not cute) and her strategy for clothing it (not appropriate). That image was paired with a picture of a killer whale, whose black-and-white color scheme echoed the color-blocking of Kardashian’s dress, and the caption “Who Wore It Best?” The photo circulated swiftly across the Internet, but it didn’t stop there: Star magazine put it on its cover, along with the headlines “65‑lb Weight Gain!” “Binges on Pasta, Cake and Ice Cream!” and “Kim’s Pregnant Nightmare!” This image is cropped closer, ending before the hem of her dress her legs aren’t visible, nor is the overall silhouette of the look - just black-and-white fabric hugging the growing curves that helped establish Kardashian’s famous, and incredibly lucrative, celebrity brand. It’s a look that E! News called “absolutely stunning.” But there was another photo from that same appearance - taken from the side as Kardashian turns her head back, presumably at the beckoning of one of the paparazzi who, at that point, were tracking her every pregnant move.
Her “bump,” as pregnant bellies have come to be called in the mainstream media, is visible, as are her white pumps, red lipstick, black wrist cuff, and perfectly made‑up face. There’s a picture of Kim Kardashian in a color-blocked black-and-white dress from Februabout five months into her first pregnancy.
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