Where Fashion and Reality TV Meet International Relations

Here’s an interesting story I came across yesterday.  Kim Kardashian, of reality TV fame, is on the cover of the Turkish edition of Cosmo — and is upset about it.  Why?  She’s Armenian.

She posed for photographs for the covers of several international editions of the magazine a while back, not knowing all of the countries to which the photos would go. (Above is the pic in the Latin American edition for Dec. 2010; Jan. 2011 it was the cover of Australian Cosmo.)  In a rather ill-timed and uninformed decision, Hearst (which publishes Cosmo) put the photo on the Turkish edition for the edition to be released in mid-April, right before the day that Armenians commemorate the genocide that they suffered at the hands of the Turks in the earlier part of the 20th century.

It’s not often that history, international politics, and fashion magazines come together in a story like this.