Kim Kardashian's Paper Magazine Cover — Jean-Paul Goude's 1976 Champagne Incident photograph that inspired the PAPER cover

Kim Kardashian's Paper Magazine Cover

2014viral imageclassic

Published September 4, 2026

On November 11th, 2014, Paper Magazine dropped a nude cover of Kim Kardashian balancing a champagne glass on her bare backside under the tagline "Break the Internet." The image lit up Twitter and Instagram within hours and kicked off a wave of photoshopped parodies that turned the shoot into one of the defining viral moments of that year.

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Overview

Kim Kardashian's Paper Magazine Cover refers to a set of studio photographs shot for the Winter 2014 issue of the New York indie fashion title Paper, printed under the tagline "Break the Internet / Kim Kardashian"1. The most-shared image shows Kardashian, oiled and nude, popping a bottle of champagne so the arc lands in a glass balanced on her buttocks2. A second, full-frontal image ran inside the issue3.

The pictures were commissioned from French photographer Jean-Paul Goude, who was recreating his 1976 portrait Carolina Beaumont from his book Jungle Fever4. The meme is not just the shoot itself but the flood of photoshopped edits that followed, swapping Kardashian's body into centaurs, docking stations, Simpsons scenes and Bruce Willis's bald head, usually posted under the hashtags #BreakTheInternet and #ThingsThatLookLikeKimKardashiansBum23.

Origin & Background

Platform
Paper Magazine (source) / Twitter and Instagram (viral spread)
Creator
Jean-Paul Goude
Date
2014

On November 11th, 2014, the Paper Magazine Twitter account posted a link to a short article showing two Jean-Paul Goude studio shots of the then-34-year-old Kardashian, both stamped with the caption "Break the Internet / Kim Kardashian"4. Within a day the tweet had picked up more than 3,200 retweets and 2,500 favorites4.

Kardashian shared the champagne-arc image to her own Instagram the same evening, where it pulled in over 462,000 likes and nearly 15,000 comments in the first day4. Her husband Kanye West retweeted the cover shortly after with the hashtag #ALLDAY, endorsing the shoot to his own audience3.

How It Spread

By November 12th, 2014, the cover was the dominant topic on Twitter, with #BreakTheInternet mentioned more than 42,000 times and #ThingsThatLookLikeKimKardashiansBum used over 2,500 times in the first 24 hours4. Dozens of photoshopped parodies started surfacing on Twitter, Instagram, Reddit and Tumblr the same day4.

The Daily Mail rounded up early edits including Twitter user @KelKulus turning Kardashian into a centaur, @AngryBritain grafting her onto a Barclays Cycle Hire docking station, an Entourage-era Adrian Grenier superimposing his own head on her body, and a Simpsons-style Springfield version2. E! Online catalogued more, among them a Bruce Willis two-heads edit and a Toronto morning-show host who swapped himself in with a coffee cup instead of champagne3.

Outside social media, the story was picked up almost immediately by celebrity and mainstream press, from Vanity Fair5 and TIME6 to The Washington Post7, which argued the internet would break without her rather than because of her7.

How to Use This Meme

The template typically keeps Goude's exact pose and lighting from the champagne-arc shot and swaps out one element: the body becomes an animal, a landmark, or a cartoon character; the champagne becomes coffee, beer or something absurd; or the glass on the backside is replaced with another object. Edits are commonly captioned #BreakTheInternet or #ThingsThatLookLikeKimKardashiansBum, keeping the reference obvious even when the subject is unrecognizable2.

Frequently Asked Questions