But when her much-mocked appearance on the front of Interview magazine’s ‘American Dream Issue’ this week is anything to go by, the times of which are well and truly behind her.

The quilt – and subsequent shoot – features Kardashian with Farrah Fawcett-esque blonde hair (an addition to her look since May, when she cosplayed Marilyn Monroe on the Met Gala), wearing denim and standing in front of the US flag.

“It’s an all-American image if ever there have been one,” Olivia Truffaut-Wong noted in a bit for The Cut, “and a distinctly different aesthetic from the look that made her famous – the one heavily inspired by Black culture, which led to her being accused of cultural appropriation time and time again.”

Over the past six months, amid speculation she’s reversed the alleged procedure accountable for her famed hourglass figure, critics on Twitter have noted a shift into what entrepreneur Ashlee Ray on Wednesday called “Kim K’s white woman era”.

“Kim K really said ‘look guys I’m white again!!’” one other Twitter user wrote of the Interview cover.

While a 3rd tweeted: “I actually have so many thoughts about how the return to her status of ‘white woman’ after years of doing blatant black/brown face is coupled with a lot American flag imagery. Like saying the categories of ‘American’ and ‘white’ are one and the identical.”

Kardashian, who’s of American-Armenian descent, has long been criticised for engaging in, as The Cut editor-in-chief Lindsay Peoples once put it, “a type of mimicry of Black people, without actually ever having to take care of any of the downsides of being Black in America”.

Within the decade-plus since she and her bevy of famous sisters first graced our TV screens, Kardashian has sported the whole lot from Fulani braids (a mode which has roots in West Africa, and which she as an alternative attributed to a different white woman, Bo Derek) to skin-darkening makeup.

And along with her much-talked-about figure, she tapped into an audience that sees her as no peculiar white woman, but as an alternative as an “exotic” and interesting one.

“It’s no secret that [the Kardashian-Jenners] have adopted many styles that Black women or Black culture have created, and made them more palatable,” Wanna Thompson, who coined the term “blackfishing” in a viral 2018 Twitter thread, told Time.

Thompson pointed to the time Kardashian wore cornrows and sweetness writers dubbed them “boxer braids”, rebranding the longtime protective style worn by Black women as a trend inspired by boxers.

“Now people think they’re copying the Kardashian-Jenners after they dress or do their hair or tan their skin a certain way,” she explained.

In a December interview, the 41-year-old told i–D that she “obviously … would never do anything to appropriate any culture”, adding that she has “learned and grown through the years”.

That, after all, didn’t stop her from fronting the March issue of Vogue with a noticeably darker complexion, closely mirroring photographs of the likes of Naomi Campbell, Beyonce and Alicia Keys, and once more prompting accusations that she had misappropriated Blackness through the altering of her own image.

Now, one only needs to take a look at the last time the fact star bared her arse on the duvet of a magazine – her “internet-breaking” 2014 Paper shoot, when she mimicked not Farrah Fawcett, but a 1976 portrait of a nude Black model by French photographer Jean-Paul Goude, whose work has often been utilized in service of the objectification and eroticisation of Black women – to see how much things have modified.

A July article from Dazed pondered whether Kardashian’s supposed Brazilian Butt Lift reversal was an indication that “white persons are ‘retiring’ from Blackness”, “after years of taking advantage of and appropriating Black women’s beauty, bodies and culture”.

It’s a sentiment that was echoed by Ellen Atlanta in a bit for The Face, who suggested that “along with her divorce from Kanye West, her increasing involvement in US politics and her legal training, Kim Kardashian is leaning away from a hypersexualised aesthetic and towards a more conservative, middle class beauty image”.

“This is critical because a lot of the Kardashian’s beauty paradigm was colonised – it was an aesthetic stolen from minorities,” Atlanta added.

“The commodification of a body type that many Black women naturally possesses – in addition to the distortion of what that appears like – reinforces the phenomenon of appropriation, especially as these features are most highly celebrated on white or light skinned women.

“The dropping of the overt BBL in favour of a ‘Country Club’ alternative, due to this fact, has coded racist messaging – are the bodies we typically attribute to Black and Latinx women not ‘conservative’ enough to be appropriate for middle class spaces?

“With women’s bodies (and particularly minority women’s bodies) being increasingly controlled, commodified and desexualised across America, it’s no coincidence that the move towards a more conservative beauty aesthetic runs in parallel with an increasingly polarised political landscape, the overturning of Roe v Wade and heightened racial tension.

“Despite its apparent evolution, the wonder standard remains to be upheld on the expense of minorities, and within the interest of classism, sexism, racism and capitalism.”