In 2014 the editors of PAPER, a revered New York City-based independent magazine focusing on fashion, popular culture, nightlife, music, art and film; founded 30 years earlier by Kim Hastreiter and David Hershkovits, had an idea for a conceptual art project for its winter issue, with the at-the-time tongue-in-cheek objective to “Break the Internet”.

Thanks to a creative team, led by Drew Elliott and Mickey Boardman, Kardashian and French photographer Jean-Paul Goude were up for the challenge and came on board.

And so it came to pass that in November 2014, Kim Kardashian was the cover star of PAPER’s "Break the Internet" issue. The photos for the issue, taken by Goude, included a re-creation of Goude's arguably most famous image, Carolina Beaumont, New York, 1976, also referred to as The Champagne Incident, which depicts Dominican model and actress Carolina Beaumont with the bottle of bubbly balancing on her butt. In a second cover image taken by Goude, Kardashian is lowering her dress to reveal an oiled backside.

The editors at PAPER anticipated a reaction to publishing Goude’s nude pictures of the reality-show star, but they never expected it to be as big as it was. The response was immediate and overwhelming, reaching a fever pitch when Kardashian’s husband, the rapper Kanye West tweeted “the butt cover” with the hashtag “#ALLDAY”. Within a couple of hours, he had been retweeted about 70,000 times. The inside photos – including a full nude not shown here – were released the following night at 8:30pm. Everyone at PAPER spent the night glued to real-time analytics, watching the traffic on the site skyrocket. The numbers were staggering. On 13 November, one day after the full story appeared, the traffic to the site measured nearly 1% of the entire web browsing activity in the United States.

The story received over 34 million unique page-views by December 2014, more than double the number of page-views PAPER normally received annually, and went on to generate more than 70 million monthly unique visitors to the website.

David Hershkowits, writing for The Guardian on 18 December 2014 admits: “The thing about popular culture – or “virality” – is that it cannot be fully predicted or manufactured. It’s more art than science, and there is no recipe.”

“That Kim Kardashian can ‘break the internet’ with a print magazine cover (as opposed to, say, an Instagram) is perhaps the biggest coup of all,” wrote Charlotte Alter in TIME. “A magazine is relevant again because the Internet is talking about it – how ironic is that?” added Lauren Tuck, on Yahoo Style.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of “Break the Internet” we asked Kim to contribute a reflection on what was without doubt an extraordinary cultural event. Her words:

"It was insane that after 30 years of work, doggedly trying to introduce our little indie magazine to a big audience, it took a nude Kim Kardashian to make PAPER a household word overnight. I look back on this issue of PAPER as a conceptual art project about virality."
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PS: Not everyone was thrilled. Break the Internet happened to coincide with the European Space Agency’s mission to perform a detailed study of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. As you might imagine, that didn’t get a whole lot of media attention that week.

Story Idea: Remo Giuffré
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References

wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_(magazine)
papermag.com/break-the-internet-kim-kardashian-cover
theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/dec/17/kim-kardashian-butt-break-the-internet-paper-magazine
time.com/3580977/kim-kardashian-break-the-internet-butt
yahoo.com/lifestyle/what-kim-kardashians-paper-magazine-cover-means
jeanpaulgoude.com/en/

Images

1. Break the Internet covers, PAPER, November 2014. Photos: Jean-Paul Goude.
2. Photographer Jean-Paul Goude. Photo credit: jeanpaulgoude.com.
3. PAPER magazine spread
4. Inspiration from Carolina Beaumont, New York, 1976, also referred to as The Champagne Incident. Photo credit: Jean-Paul Goude.
5. Twintelle parody cover by Pixelpup on Tumblr
6. Marge Bouvier Simpson Break the Internet parody
7. Comet 67P parody/commentary. Credit: Peter Fuentes on flickr.