Kim Kardashian has opened up about her decision to alter her name nearly twenty years ago, describing the choice as somewhat ‘weird’ in hindsight.
The 45-year-old first appeared on reality TV in 2005 with the pilot of Princess of Malibu and later in a few episodes of Paris Hilton’s The Simple Life. She then catapulted the Kardashian-Jenner clan into the spotlight with the launch of Keeping Up with the Kardashians in 2007.
This series aired on E! for 20 seasons, leading to numerous spin-offs like Kourtney and Khloe take The Hamptons, Dash Dolls, and Flip It Like Disick, and eventually transitioned to Hulu as The Kardashians, where it continues to flourish.
Before Kim’s debut on KUWTK, she was known by a different name, as she disclosed in a recent interview with Time Magazine.
While promoting her new MasterClass: The New Rules of Business: The Ten Kimmandments with Kim Kardashian, the Skims founder acknowledged that she initially went by her full name.
“I used to always go by Kimberly, until we signed on to do the reality show,” she shared with the publication. “And when I looked at my chyron, Kimberly Kardashian, I said, ‘I think that’s so long for people to say.’ And like, ‘Let’s just shorten it to Kim’.
“And it’s so weird, because all my friends from high school and growing up, and my dad, everyone calls me Kimberly,”
Today, she is universally recognized as Kim, even using this name for her acting roles in projects like American Horror Story: Delicate and the upcoming legal drama, All’s Fair.
In the same interview, Kim discussed how she persuaded her family to participate in the reality TV series.
The show’s inaugural season highlighted Kim, her sisters Kourtney and Khloe, along with their half-siblings Kylie and Kendall Jenner.
Other family members such as Rob Kardashian, Kris Jenner, Kim’s step-parent Caitlyn Jenner, and Kourtney’s former partner, Scott Disick, gained fame as well.
“I think I was the one that convinced everyone for sure. I really wanted it. I really wanted to do a reality show since the day MTV’s The Real World came out and I watched it with my best friend,” she explained.
“I looked at her and I told her, ‘That’s what I’m going to do.’ And she said, ‘I’ll be your manager.’ I think we were 11. I said, ‘When we’re 18, we have to make a tape and send it into The Real World.”
“Her dad’s in the music-business management world. So she said, ‘Oh, we can get my dad to send it to someone at MTV’. We made a whole plan.”
Kim also revealed that her primary motivation for the reality show was to promote her clothing store, Dash, which is now closed.
The luxury boutique, which offered apparel, accessories, and lingerie, opened its doors in 2006 but closed permanently in 2018.
“That’s how I was able to get my sisters to sign on,” she said, referring to Kourtney and Khloe.
“I let them know that, you know, it’ll bring such great promotion to our store. And they were in once they heard that.”
And from there, their journey to becoming one of the most famous families globally began.