Can Kylie Jenner Sell You Anything?

There’s a particular moment in Charli XCX’s 2025 brat concert meta mockumentary, also titled The Moment, when the crisis reaches a crescendo.

The (existential) crisis, in this case, being XCX’s Irish exit to Ibiza when her (fictional) brat concert documentary chronicaling the album’s meteoric rise spirals out of hand. And it is in Ibiza at a sun-washed wellness retreat, after receiving a bad facial, that the 365 partygirl encounters Kylie Jenner. 

As you do.

“The second you think people are getting sick of you”—Jenner delivers a line more befitting her mother—“that’s when you have to go even harder. If you’re going to do it, you have to, like, do it.” And this, dear reader, is the watershed moment in The Moment. The moment when Caesar crosses the Rubicon, when Joshua crosses the Jordan into the Promised Land, and when this vaguely true version of Charli decides to let the fashionably European director (played by Alexander Skarsgård) turn her niche club album film into a painfully sanitized mainstream movie “no grandparent could ever object to.”

Somehow, this moment also seems to encapsulate Jenner’s whole ethos. 

Because just when you thought Kylie’s influence was on the wane, she showed up at The Moment’s premiere in Margiela Spring 2026 (albeit without the four-stitched mouthpiece), at the Met Gala as a Schiaparelli sculpture of Venus de Milo (though both her arms being intact really detracted from the whole look), and most recently at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show in the most expensive piece in the history of the brand, the $50 million Fantasy Bra.

“She’s really created her own culture, which—how many people can say that?” remarked Victoria’s Secret chief creative officer Adam Selman.

Keeping Up With Kylie

1997 was the year Tom Ford sent model Georgina Grenville down the Gucci runway in a logo G-string, the year Silvia Venturini Fendi formulated the Fendi Baguette, and the year J.Lo got married for the first time. It was also the year Kylie Kristen Jenner was born, on August 10, three weeks after Gianni Versace was murdered on the steps of his Florida mansion, and three weeks before Princess Diana died and Netflix was founded. The premiere episode of South Park, “Cartman Gets an Anal Probe,” aired when Kylie was three days old.

The premiere of Keeping Up with the Kardashians aired when she was 10.

“Not a lot of memories,” she told Who What Wear, “I was 9 years old. [Cameras] were there one day in the house.” Now, after nearly 20 years of reality-show surveillance, relatability is really the least of her concerns.  “She’s always been the most, I would say, individual of all of us,” says older sister Kim Kardashian. “She’s always known what she wanted to do in life, always known who she is at a young age, and has always been very confident.” 

It was this konfidence that led Kylie towards Instagram stardom. 

Teal hair, thickset eyebrows, overlined matte lips, Snapchat stories and a horde of black bags – this was Kylie Jenner circa 2015, specifically known as King Kylie. Amid much speculation about her prominent pout, in November 2015 she launched Lip Kit by Kylie, a trio of matte liquid lipsticks paired with lip liners. The collection sold out in under a minute. The website crashed. 

By 2016, Kylie Cosmetics was big business. The world was eager to keep up.

Army Pants and Flip-Flops

“On 30 September 2018,” reported The Guardian, “Kylie Jenner – Kardashian scion, businesswoman and owner of a world-famous pout – uploaded a photo to Instagram. In it, she posed beside a blacked-out Range Rover in a pink Katharine Hamnett jacket, cinched at the waist with a grey Chanel bumbag. Underneath, she wore black cycling shorts, white socks and chunky Joshua Sanders trainers in a silvery metallic finish.”

“In Leicester, a 20-year-old student Queentonia Ojeka studied the post closely,” it concludes, “So Ojeka did what millions of young women across the country do every day: went online and purchased a tweed blazer from the American low-cost retailer Fashion Nova for $30 (£23), which she paired with £8 chocolate-brown cycling shorts from the British brand PrettyLittleThing.”

“I love Kylie Jenner,” Ojeka admits. “As much as I hate to admit [it]. Her fashion is evolving, which is why I like her even more.”

And in the years since, that desire for reinvention has remained, even if the relatability hasn’t. 

First came “the New New Face.” I-D reported, “Making a face so new it’s almost science fiction is, I’ve noticed, very 2017. Not every girl has the financial means for such radical redevelopment: but you can learn how to use an eyebrow pencil, matte lip paint, a contour kit, and a decent light-source.”

Then came (short-lived) billionaire status, accompanied by the Hermès collection: a Faubourg Birkin worth $300,000, a diamond Himalaya Kelly 35 (the one bag she’d take ‘if my house was on fire’), and a ’90s sterling silver Kelly she carried to a Beyoncé concert with boyfriend Timothée Chalamet.

And with that came the fashion cred. 

While her own brand, Khy, dove headfirst into stealth wealth’s wardrobe-first minimalism, she made regular red carpet rounds in Gaultier, Mugler and Margiela. At the Marty Supreme premiere, she twinned with Timothée in custom orange Chrome Hearts. Her Vanity Fair cover – smoking a cigarette in a corset and Hermès jodhpurs – is an homage to Helmut Newton’s Madonna. Her closing look alone for Coperni Spring 2015 – a gothic-Cinderella gown set in Sleeping Beauty’s Castle – drove 66% of the brand’s total media impact value.

“For someone so powerful,” says Jonny Johansson, creative director of Acne Studios, “she still carries a sense of being underestimated.”

So, She Went Even Harder

“She’s terrifying in the same way the meanest, prettiest, most popular girl in middle school was, and because of that, I love her,” Amanda wrote back in 2016, “I want her approval. She accesses some strange, still-teenage part of my brain that I can’t shut off entirely. I am 30 years old.” 

You see, where the Kardashian klan’s signature was spike heels and bodycon bodysuits, Kylie’s was Tumblr candids and teenage rebellion. And a decade – and several dramatic reinventions – later, not much has changed really. 

She’s still that rebellious, relatable reality teen who grew up (not entirely consensually) on national television. Patient zero of cohort Gen Z, if you will. And casting her as a Victoria’s Secret Angel—THE Victoria’s Secret Angel—is nothing short of genius marketing. “If anyone else had worn that Fantasy Bra, it would’ve just been another look on the runway. But because it was Kylie, it’s all anyone is talking about.” wrote X user @jkells_84.

And yet, that’s just one side of the story. 

Because when Miu Miu – patron saint of quirky, awkward oddballs who read and most definitely don’t advertise their line of nude lip-liners – cast Kylie in its Fall 2025 campaign, the backlash was swift and sweeping. Not because Kylie doesn’t read (her own personal reading milestones, in fact, include Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us and It Starts with Us), but because “Jenner does not fit—incongruous is the word,” writes Madeline Sensibile-Yazzetta. “Can’t the wonderfully strange girls keep a little something for themselves?”

Response to Stella McCartney’s FW26 Wild Horses campaign, also starring Jenner, was no less scathing. “Don’t use this woman to represent your brand. She tarnishes it and she and her families certainly do NOT respect or protect animals!” read a comment on the brand’s Instagram. 

“Stella… TELL ME WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY?” cries another.

But perhaps most damning of all has been the Meta partnership. 

“Meta already controls roughly 80% of the AI glasses market. The people who were going to buy AI glasses already bought them. The next growth move was never deeper into the existing market. It was into an audience that had not yet considered the category.” wrote Inc. “And Jenner’s audience is that audience.” Eva Chen, Vice President of Fashion at Meta, adds, “Kylie is such a force; she really influences the way women and girls dress. Plus, she thinks like a content creator — and, most importantly, she loves the product.” 

But surveillance is nothing new to Kylie. 

Only now she’s taking it mainstream for the rest of us.