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Kim Kardashian Gets Real About Staging Paparazzi Shots: ‘It Was Cool to Be Desperate Back Then’

January 25, 2026

Before “personal branding” became a career strategy and visibility turned into currency, Kim Kardashian was already playing the game—on purpose. She wasn’t waiting to be discovered. She was engineering moments, showing up where cameras would be, and treating attention like a full-time job. Looking back, she doesn’t cringe. She laughs.

On Khloé in Wonder Land, host Khloé Kardashian sits down with her sister, who opens up about the early hustle that helped build her empire and why being “desperate” wasn’t embarrassing, but strategic. If you’ve ever wondered whether putting yourself out there is worth it, this convo is for you.

She treated visibility like a full-time job

It started during her Dancing with the Stars run in 2007. Kim and her team made “Vote for Kim” T-shirts and would strategically walk down Robertson Boulevard—the famous L.A. street where paparazzi were known to camp out. “You knew where they were, so you would just go,” Kim explains. It wasn’t luck. It wasn’t being in the right place at the right time. It was showing up to the right place on purpose, over and over again.

And she’s refreshingly unapologetic about it. “It was cool to be desperate back then,” she says. “It is all I wanted. I lived for it.”

That honesty hits differently in an era where everyone’s trying to seem chill, unbothered, and effortlessly booked. Kim wasn’t pretending she didn’t want attention. She treated being seen like part of the job. The shift is small but it matters. Visibility isn’t something you sit around waiting for, and it doesn’t magically land on the most talented person in the room. Most of the time, it finds the person who keeps showing up, even when it feels awkward, even when it feels a little try-hard, even when they care too much.

How to manufacture your own moment

Kim recounts a night in New York when she and her friend Jonathan Cheban heard that Britney Spears was staying at a particular hotel—which meant paparazzi would be swarming the entrance.

Problem: they weren’t famous enough to have their own photographers following them yet.

Solution: get creative.

First, they needed transportation that looked the part. “This person at dinner had this crazy Rolls-Royce Phantom. Jonathan and I could hardly even get a cab,” Kim recalls. “So we’re like, ‘Oh, can we get a ride to our hotel?’ And the guy’s like, ‘Yeah.’ And Jonathan and I are like, ‘We’ll sit in the back. You sit in the front. So it looks like we got out with a driver.'”

They pulled up to Britney’s hotel, stepped out of the borrowed Rolls-Royce, and immediately got swarmed. “They come out and they’re like, ‘Kim, Kim, Kim, are you here to visit Britney?'” she says. But here’s the thing—they didn’t actually know anyone at that hotel. They had no reason to be there. So what did they do? “We go into a phone booth ‘cause we’re like, ‘We don’t know anyone at this hotel.’” They hid there for 20 minutes, then walked back out like they’d just finished a visit. “We totally scammed the system,” Kim says. “And it was like on every [magazine] cover. And we thought we were killing it.”

Is it unhinged? Absolutely. Is it also kind of genius? Also yes. The lesson here isn’t “borrow strangers’ cars and lie to paparazzi.” It’s that opportunity doesn’t always come to you—sometimes you have to engineer the moment yourself. Kim saw a gap (paparazzi at a hotel, no one photographing her) and figured out how to insert herself into the narrative. That’s not desperation. That’s strategy.

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The cringe is the point

If this all sounds wildly confident, it wasn’t. Kim had to learn how to act like the version of herself everyone sees today. She describes how Jonathan would remind her to stop being so friendly with the photographers—because approachability wasn’t the vibe they were going for. “One time Jonathan was like, ‘You have got to stop smiling. Like, Victoria Beckham never smiles,’” Kim recalls. “So we’d walk out of Intermix on Robertson. And he would be like, ‘Victoria, Victoria.’ And I’d be like, ‘Oh, get it together.'”

She was literally practicing a persona, learning how to perform confidence and mystique even when her instinct was to smile and wave. The image we now associate with Kim—polished, unflappable, always camera-ready—was something she actively built. It didn’t come naturally. She had to learn to stop undermining herself with over-friendliness and commit to the bit.

And even with all that effort, she still had moments where she thought it was all going to fall apart. When Khloé asks if there was ever a time Kim thought her reputation wouldn’t survive something, her answer is immediate: “Hundreds of times. Bazillions of times.” But she kept going anyway.

That’s the real takeaway here. The “desperate” moves you’re scared to make—the cold emails, the self-promotion, the showing up where you weren’t explicitly invited—might be exactly what works. The uncomfy feeling is often just fear of being seen trying. But trying is how anything gets built. Kim hid in a phone booth and borrowed a stranger’s car, and now she’s a billionaire. Your follow-up email is going to be fine.

For more insights, tune into Khloé in Wonder Land, streaming now wherever you get your podcasts.