When Kim Kardashian and Kanye West split up last year, Kardashian didn’t only lose a husband, but a stylist as well. For years West dictated what his wife could wear, sending her texts containing specific size guidelines for sunglasses and throwing out enough of her shoes to leave the reality star in tears. Together, the couple turned Kardashian into a bit of a fashion icon, one with a distinct style, strong relationships with designers, and a more or less a standing invitation at the Met Gala (an event she was previously all but banned from). Now, though, Kardashian is back on her own, and she’s admitting that, at first, the pressure to dress herself was stressful.
In a recent episode of The Kardashians, Kim talks to her sister, Kourtney, about how she’s dealing with the split. The ex-couple has normal divorce issues, like West’s refusal to sign the papers, but Kim also admits she’s struggling to fill the stylist gap West left in his wake. “I got to a point where I would ask his advice for everything down to what I wear,” she says. “Even now I’m having panic attacks, like what do I wear?”
Kardashian explained that West styled her for Saturday Night Live, but it seems like that was his final gig. In last week’s episode Kardashian revealed West walked out during her monologue, mad she mentioned divorcing him and called him a “rapper” when he’s “so much more than” that. So, when it was time to go to the WSJ. Magazine Innovator Awards a few weeks later, she was without a stylist. “I was like, ‘How do I wear something that hasn’t been pre-vetted first?’ Like, it was like psychologically [hard],” she told her sister.
In the end, Kardashian figured it out and attended the event—where she won an award for her shapewear company Skims—in a look from the brand’s collab with Fendi, a brown leather dress with matching gloves and a pair of Tom Ford for Gucci fall /winter 1999 over-the-knee lizard boots. It was n’t a big departure from the looks West had been putting Kardashian in—still tight and mostly monochrome—but West was not a fan, and after the event, he reached out to his ex to inform her of his distaste for the look.
“He called me afterwards. He told me my career’s over and then he showed me a picture of Marge Simpson wearing something similar,” she said. It’s unclear exactly which Marge look West sent to Kardashian, though Twitter does have a few ideas.
Is it such an insult to be compared to Marge Simpson, though? The woman is kind of a fashion icon. Back in 1996, there was a whole episode of The Simpsons about her wearing a pink Chanel suitand just last year, she modeled for Balenciaga. West was obviously trying to knock his ex down a peg with that reference, but hey, there are worse (and less fashionable) cartoon characters to which she could have been compared.
