On Sunday, the 10th season of Keeping Up with the Kardashians premieres on E!. Love them or hate them, this family has become arguably the biggest success reality television hath wrought. Their show turned them from a mildly famous wealthy California family to global superstars. And what’s so beautiful about the whole thing is that we’ve got the glossy paper trail to prove how it all happened.
Their story is not one of luck, but one of careful plotting and planning, most of which can be credited to family matriarch Kris Jenner. While Rob, stepfather Bruce, and stepbrother Brody have gotten some increased fame from the show, it’s truly the sisters that Kris has had the biggest success with, parlaying their good looks, dramatic relationships and pregnancies into beauty products, clothing lines and endless party sponsorships.
In the eight years KUWTK and its spinoffs have been on the air, the Kardashian sisters have been on more than 120 covers—some of them together, but most of them individually. While the ratings of their shows have ebbed and flowed over the years, racking in between roughly 2 and 5 million viewers an episode, their status as people who are controversially dominant in the cultural conversation and apparently not going anywhere has only gotten firmer.
The Kardashians have bought their success, to some degree, and it can plainly seen each week through their slowly increasing presence on the covers of tabloids. But one of the best ways to visualize their rise is through their presence on the covers of the magazines they didn’t somehow pay for. From Kim’s debut on the cover of Complex in 2007, which she quickly followed up with an appearance on Playboy that was documented for KUWTK, the quality of the magazines the family has been featured on has dramatically improved. Kim has gone from being a sexpot on men’s magazines to nabbing the holy grail of all magazine covers, Vogue. And, now on her way to becoming a supermodel, Kendall has gone from being featured on the cover of Teen Prom to getting her own Allure cover.
These are the sisters’ respective non-tabloid cover counts to date, as fully accounted for as possible:
Of all the sisters, Kim by and large has been on most covers, which is largely a credit to the years in which KUWTK was airing but her sisters had not quite yet gained her level of fame. From 2007 to 2010, she was basically the only family member with her own notable cover presence. In the first year, those covers were for men’s magazines, and it was sexy stuff: Playboy, Complex, King.
But by 2009, things were starting to change. Kourtney had her first child, Mason, which was the start of years of her appearing on magazines like Fit Pregnancy. The KUWTK spinoff Kourtney and Khloé Take Miami started airing, and Khloe married NBA player Lamar Odom. Meanwhile, Kim had moved away from men’s magazines and was nabbing spots on the covers of lower-brow women’s/entertainment magazines (including Atlanta’s very own Jezebel).
In 2010, Kim and her football playing boyfriend Reggie Bush, who had been featured on the show, broke up. That year, the three eldest sisters appeared together on a couple more low-budget magazines: Vegas Magazine and Las Angeles Confidential. And Kim had moved from sexy men’s magazine model to women’s magazine cover star, nabbing covers on multiple international editions of Cosmopolitan and Shape. Her big coup, however, was getting on “The Art issue” of W magazine, which—like her Playboy cover before it—was dramatically televised on KUWTK, when she found out she would be nude, covered in only body paint, on the inside of the issue.
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