‘Clueless’ Inspired Kim Kardashian to Buy This Priceless Monet

One day in early February 2022, I was hanging out at Kim’s office as she tried to cram two cover shoots into one day. Between the shoots, Kim was back in her glam room, getting RE-glammed with different hair and new makeup, this time to shoot the cover of Vogue Hong Kong. Kim was effusive and bossy, running her multibillion-dollar business in a bathrobe, two gay men pulling at her hair and face. At one point, as she was helped into and then out of a complicated, totally sheer Schiaparelli tulle dress — it was pretty much nothing but scaffolding — I looked up from my phone and she was entirely naked. Neither of us flinched. Lately, she and I had been playing a little game of “Guess What Happened in 1995?” because we kept being surprised by the astonishing number of cultural and technological shifts — to say nothing of her own complicated personal circumstances — that unfolded in that one year. Once she was dressed and sitting back in her chair, I said to Kim, “You know what else happened in 1995?” She looked at me expectantly. The movie Clueless came out (her favorite film). When it was first released, Kim and her father (and a group of Kim’s friends and their fathers) all went to see it together. “We were dying at every reference,” she told me. “It was so me in high school. … I had pretty much every outfit that the girls wore in Clueless. … I was still into Contempo Casuals and shopping at Judy’s at the Century City Mall. … Like, when I saw that movie, I couldn’t believe it. Clueless is still, to this day, my favorite movie. It really resonated.”

Clueless, inspired by Jane Austen’s Emma, stars Alicia Silverstone as Cher Horowitz, a ditzy but well-meaning rich girl living in the ultraprivileged bubble of her Beverly Hills high school. “I just wanted this fake world that you would see in a comedy of manners about the turn of the century,” director Amy Heckerling said in an interview, adding, “Positivity fascinates me — I don’t understand it … so I started to think about a character that would be so happy and sure things would work out.”

A character like Kim.

Clueless was written and directed in 1994, right as Kim was entering her freshman year at Marymount High School, and right as her family was becoming a fixture in the inescapable O.J. Simpson news cycle. Heckerling’s highly tuned antennae capture such a specific moment of Beverly Hills youth culture; it’s hard to believe something of Kim’s life wasn’t absorbed from the ether. Cher goes to the mall and shops at Contempo Casuals and Fred Segal. She is obsessed with her closet, the organization of which puts even Kim to shame. Cher’s iconic yellow plaid outfit evoked Kim’s Catholic school girl uniform as imagined by Donatella Versace. Kim and Kourtney and their friends carpooled to school, blasting hip-hop in a white BMW, while Cher drives her friends in a white Jeep Wrangler. Cher famously volunteers to be “captain of the Pismo Beach disaster relief” effort, while Kim spent Coastal Cleanup Day scouring the Santa Monica beaches for trash. All of the scenes in the ostentatiously enormous house where Cher lives with her strict, attorney father (who happens to look exactly like O.J. lawyer Robert Shapiro) were shot in a 10,000-square-foot house in Encino, just down the road from Robert Kardashian’s 11,000-square-foot former home on Mandalay Drive, which, much like the fictional Horowitz residence, features a grand double staircase. As their homes become the prep site for a big trial, Kim and Cher both take an interest in their father’s legal work. Ripped straight from the headlines, Cher calls her brother-in-law Josh a “Kato” — as in Kato Kaelin, one of the minor witnesses in the O.J. trial — meaning “freeloader.”

Much of the infamous slang from the film — the texture that provides the crackling authenticity — came from Heckerling’s impeccable ear for the way people really talk (gay men, stoners, rappers), but there was another source, one with surprising proximity to Kim. “I have to give props to the UCLA linguistics department,” said Heckerling. “They published a list of slang words and phrases, and Monet came from that.” (As Cher explains to Dionne: “She’s a full-on Monet. It’s like a painting, see? From far away it’s OK, but up close it’s a big ol’ mess.”) You could literally throw a rock from Kim’s high school parking lot at Marymount across Sunset and it would land on the UCLA campus. Seniors at Marymount often walked over to hang out in the quad. All of which is to say, some of the ’90s slang collected by the students at UCLA may very well have been uttered by Marymount students.

In Kim’s glam room, as she was explaining why Clueless is her favorite movie — indeed, the impact it had on her teenage years — she said, “And that’s the reason I bought my Monet.” I stared at her and blinked a couple of times. “The first real piece of art that I bought — myself — was a Monet. Because in the movie they called the girls ‘a Monet’ if they look good from afar, but up close they’re just a mess.” I was still staring and blinking, trying not to let on how extravagantly implausible this sounded. Kim bought a Monet not because she had visited the famous Water Lilies at l’Orangerie in Paris or under the art world tutelage of Kanye West. She bought a Monet for the same reason she kept the box of chicken McNuggets from her first date with TJ Jackson — a piece of high school nostalgia.

She continued: “I was in Italy, and it was being auctioned, and I was with Kim Jones [creative director of Fendi], and we were doing our Fendi/Skims fitting in Rome. I really wanted this Monet painting because it’s a gray Monet — a pretty landscape, but gray. … I really wanted it for my Tadao Ando house in Palm Springs, which is all concrete. And I’m bidding and I’m bidding, and it was the first auction that I ever did, so I didn’t really know how they worked. But you get really into it. So Kim Jones is there with me and he’s like, “GET IT!” So I bid on it. I win. And I went over what my budget was because you’re in the moment.”

And then, in true Cher Horowitz fashion, a blunder straight out of a comedy of manners: “So, I got it. It’s delivered. And it’s like … THIS big. Like, a postcard. I didn’t think to check the dimensions! I thought it was going to cover a whole wall! I’m going to put it in my Ando when it’s done,” she says, laughing. “Like in the powder room.”

Excerpted from Citizen Kim by Jonathan Van Meter. Copyright 2026. Reprinted by permission of Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House, LLC.

This story appeared in the Oct. 21 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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