The Kardashians – I believe you’ve heard of them? – descended on Funke restaurant in Beverly Hills for Kim Kardashian’s 43rd birthday on Friday night, and by either divine intuition or Kris Jenner’s intervention, the paparazzi were there to capture their arrival. (It feels like an oversight that there’s not yet a dedicated collective noun for Kardashians… A kontour?) Unsurprisingly, Kim – a woman who would have us believe she wears vintage Gucci chainmail to bed – wore the sort of red Balenciaga dress that every tabloid from here to wherever Rupert Murdoch is hating retirement will be forced to describe as “RAVISHING”. I wish Joan Rivers were alive just to hear the trussed chicken jokes she would have made about all of those strings.
If you’ve devoted even one brain cell to following fashion in the last few months, you’ll know by now that – with apologies to Pantone’s poor, forgotten Viva Magenta – red is the colour of the year. There were “pops” of it at The Row and Stella McCartney. Maximilian Davis claimed the scarlet of the Trinidad and Tobago flag as his own in his Ferragamo debut, while Sabato De Sarno introduced “Gucci Rosso” during his spring/summer 2024 collection at Milan Fashion Week. The less said about tomato girl anything, the better, but suffice to say, it involved a fair amount of red, too – to say nothing of the hours I’ve lost staring at Diana Vreeland in her “garden from hell” living room. For what it’s worth, Vreeland’s favourite shade of red was “the colour of a child’s cap in any Renaissance portrait”. Of course.
“Red takes no prisoners,” wrote Charlotte Sinclair in an essay for Vogue back in 2017, when the colour was having another moment after Riccardo Tisci unveiled his final collection for Givenchy entirely in “Givenchy Red”. “It is emphasis itself, the double underline, the stop sign, the alert, the roadblock, the alarm, the danger, the oomph, the sex, the passion, the incitement, the excitement. It’s the colour of kings and queens, war and empire, theatre and power. Red is adrenaline, fireworks, the break with convention. It is shame and violence and blushing and rage.” It’s also a surefire way to ensure all eyes are on you – which, as Kim well knows, is a power all its own.
This article was originally published on Vogue UK.
