Think the environment’s trying to tell her something?
Kourtney Kardashian presented her polarizing “sustainable” clothing line for fast fashion brand Boohoo on the runway at New York Fashion Week Tuesday, but the festivities got off to a rocky start.
While the invite noted the show would begin “promptly at 8 p.m.,” the lights didn’t dim at the High Line venue until nearly an hour later — and seconds after the first model hit the catwalk, the power cut out, leaving her strutting her stuff in the silent dark.
A few minutes later, the show restarted from the top, only for a crew member to dash out onto the runway and pull back that same model once more as the music stopped; apparently she’d stepped out too early this time.
“They restarted the Kourtney Kardashian x Boohoo show three times where is Kris,” one attendee quipped on Twitter.
Indeed, the Kardashian-Jenner matriarch wasn’t in attendance, but Kourtney and husband Travis Barker both were; moments before the show started (the first time), the newlyweds emerged from backstage to take their seats in the front row, bypassing the front-of-house chaos.
Jonathan “Foodgod” Cheban, Bobby Shmurda, Paige DeSorbo and Madison LeCroy were among the other stars with prime perches at the presentation; “Real Housewife of New Jersey” Teresa Giudice brought along daughters Gia and Milania.
Once things got rolling for real, it was smooth sailing; guests whooped and hollered when Blink-182’s “What’s My Age Again?” blared from the speakers during one section of the show, complementing the collection’s oversized Blink graphic tee ($30) — which “has vintage throwback written all over it,” per the product description, but is not actually vintage and may or may not have been produced with sustainable cotton.
That murkiness of mission has marred the rollout of Kardashian’s latest launch; when Boohoo announced the Poosh founder as its “newest ambassador with a focus on sustainability” and shared that she’d be designing two collections with an eco-friendly focus, social media users slammed the partnership as “utter BS,” “insulting” and “embarrassing,” among other things.
In August, Kourtney and sister Kim were included in a list of stars who surpassed their monthly water allowances multiple times amid California’s drought emergency. The famous family has also come under fire recently for their frequent use of carbon-spewing private jets.
Boohoo itself, meanwhile, has been criticized for adding hundreds of new items (that may later wind up in landfills) to its site per day, as well as for a 2020 investigation by The Guardian that revealed the company was paying its Pakistani factory workers as little as 29p an hour to toil in “appalling conditions.”
Ironically, in August, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced Boohoo was one of several retailers being investigated for “potentially misleading green claims” about their products.
Kardashian acknowledged her collaboration’s backlash (while simultaneously defending it) on Instagram Tuesday — the same day the 45-piece collection, which is priced from $6 to $100, became available for purchase.
“I went back and forth about doing this collection with @boohoo because the first thing I think about when I hear the words ‘fast fashion’ is that it’s bad for our planet,” she wrote.
“Boohoo approached me to be a sustainability ambassador, and though I knew it would get backlash because the two just don’t go hand in hand, I thought about the fact that fast fashion, or the fashion industry in general, isn’t going anywhere.”
Kardashian said she hoped the partnership “would be impactful” by “holding [Boohoo] accountable to larger change” and bringing sustainability issues to the attention of “people who may otherwise have no idea about the impacts of fast fashion on our planet.”
“It’s definitely making some noise which is exactly what I was hoping for,” she concluded, adding that she was “proud about doing it with intention and purpose.”
