KIM KARDASHIAN is often compared to Marilyn Monroe. This story proposes additional characters. Although @collierschorrstudio shot the #032c cover star in Los Angeles, the visual conversation between the two takes us far away from Hollywood. Imagine an alternate reality where @kimkardashian coexists with the heroine in the Brothers Grimm’s “Die Sterntaler” (“The Star Money”), in which a young girl strips herself bare in the forest to give her clothing to others in need – only to be rewarded in celestial coinage, rained down on her by the cosmos. Imagine that in the same world we find director Rainer Werner Fassbinder and muse Hanna Schygulla, star of the New German Cinema classic The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), whose titular character tells her lover, “I prefer making miracles to waiting for them.” Imagine that Kardashian is Schygulla with a dash of Martha Graham, the modern dancer and choreographer who told us that “the body is a sacred garment,” and who taught “spiraling” as a means of finding balance. Equilibrium, in this universe, is achieved by a pendulum swing between supposed opposites – between interiority and external experience, masking and unmasking. When Kardashian took off her makeup for Schorr, she found balance by uncovering herself à la Sterntaler.