Later that evening, freshly showered, free of makeup, and wrapped in a fuzzy white robe, Kim tucks into her breakfast banquette for a plant-based stir-fry prepared by one of her two full-time chefs. The shoot is finished in the nick of time, before the day’s last swath of golden light disappears behind the hills. She cuts deals in short order, managing to give each child her undivided attention without ever losing her cool-her superpower, she tells me, is staying calm in any situation.

“Five million Roblox?” faux-gasps the CEO of two billion-dollar companies, Skims and a relaunching beauty line (formerly KKW Beauty). When Mother Kimberly does appear shortly thereafter, her arrival is so casual that the energy on the shoot barely shifts. But the witching hour, when mysterious forces turn happy children into inconsolable wretches, is fast approaching, and Kim has yet to emerge from the “glam room” tucked inside her closet, which corresponds less in size to a conventional wardrobe and more to the footprint of a classic six in Manhattan. A group of caretakers tells Saint to slow down he’s wearing, appropriately, a lime-green Kawasaki shirt picked out by North, who has styled all the kids. North’s younger siblings take turns zipping around their sister on the fleet of motorized toy cars at their disposal. North, dressed in a white Skims tee and an old pair of her mother’s artfully tattered Levi’s, cinched at the waist, has been practicing her free throws on the black basketball court that Kim once built for Kanye, in the marriage’s better days.

Kim’s children, North, 8 Saint, 6 Chicago, 4 and Psalm, 2, whom she shares with her soon-to-be ex-husband, Kanye West, have been playing for the last hour, trailed by clicking cameras. We’re only 20 minutes north of the thrum of Los Angeles, though you’d never know it watching the cottontail bunnies dart between hedges. It’s the first week of January, after another holiday thrown into chaos by COVID, and the winter sun is starting to set behind a Vogue team gathered to photograph Kim Kardashian and her four children in the parklike grounds of Kim’s modernist Hidden Hills, California, estate.

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