On August 20, 2011, reality star Kim Kardashian proudly proclaimed “I do,” and skeptics everywhere snickered. Now, less than three months later, Ms. Kardashian has revealed that her made-in-media-heaven marriage has gone kaput. Despite telling correspondents how the nuptials were the moment for her and her rent-a-groom, Kris, to shine, the ceremony has only ended up being the punch line for a thousand late-night comedy monologues. Not since Barbie and Ken parted ways has the breakup of two such plastic people been reported!

What is so fascinating about the Kim Kardashian experience, and her whole career as a whole, is that she rose to prominence via a raunchy video and managed to turn what might have been an embarrassing liaison into a multimillion-dollar franchise for her, her mother, her stepfather, her brother, her sisters, and her brother-in-law. It is mind-blowing how a romp before a flip camera has backflipped into a weekly E Television show with a myriad of spin-offs.

As is the case with so many young “starlets” today, they nod their hair extensions toward Barbie as a fashion inspiration and role model. For Ms. Kim, the curvaceous fashion doll does resemble her in two key areas (tiny waist, ample bosom), but Kardashian’s world-famous booty blows Barbie out of the water. Kim’s end is the end-all-and-be-all for plush tushes.

Two years ago, before the fairy-tale wedding collapsed into a grim ending, the red carpet diva/spokesperson/self-promoter posed as Barbie in a 14-page KURV magazine photo layout. It was an amazing merger of subject with object, well-known person with better-known doll.

Fascinatingly, many of the women who parade across TV these days are likened to dolls, and some of them have translated that comparison into somewhat lucrative marketing deals. Paris Hilton, the queen of exhibitionism, loaned her likeness and her tabloid-grabbing ways to the German doll company SIMBA. Three fashion dolls based on the debutante’s supposed madcap, marvelous lifestyle were offered to the European buying public back in 2009. Hilton gamely went along with the press push to make these dolls desirable and collectible. In Paris’s own trademarked vocabulary, she did her best to make them “hot.” The public’s reaction remained measurably cool.

Before there was Paris and Kim gallivanting about in the National Enquirer headlines, there was Anna Nicole Smith, and her stint as a “celebrity” should be a cautionary tale for other wannabe one-hit wonders. Drugged up and stumbling around, she starred in a chain of very bad z-grade films, showed up for any kind of grand opening to cash a personal appearance fee, and allowed her life to be filmed for voyeurs everywhere to kick back and “enjoy.” After her death, bobble head dolls with her peroxide hairdo and bright red lips popped up on eBay. A fashion doll customized in Smith’s image, created by Tina Lia (www.tinalia.com) as a tribute to the fallen star, made the news and gathered media commentary and Internet coverage.

Interestingly, years before her untimely death in 2007, I spoke with a very incoherent Anna Nicole on the phone at DOLLS magazine. She had called up complaining that someone had made a doll of her and we were selling it through our latest issue. No such doll existed then, to the best of my knowledge, and it certainly wasn’t in our magazine. After going around in circles with her for nearly 10 minutes, she put her attorney, Howard K. Stern, on the phone, and the matter was finally clarified. Before we said good-bye, Stern told me that Anna Nicole adored dolls, and would love to have one made of her, but she had to be paid for her image. That’s what her career was all about, he told me—posing and getting compensated. I said I fully understood where he and his client were coming from. It was 1997—about a decade before she passed away—and the handwriting was already getting scribbled on the wall. One of the many books that came out in the wake of her death was “Great Big Beautiful Doll,” and it summed up her steady decline from luminescent Playmate to bizarre reality TV show curiosity.

Dolls occur in all of these ladies’ lives in flattering ways and in exploitative ways, as well. Anna Nicole and Paris were both approached to have “sex dolls” made of them, and both women publicly declined. Enterprising manufacturers went behind Kim Kardashian’s well-endowed back and made one without her agreement. The “Kinky Kim” doll was quickly slapped with an injunction to “cease and desist” its sultriness.

Compared to other bimbos and sexpots who have wiggled before her, Kim Kardashian does seem to have a mind for finance: perhaps like Melanie Griffith’s character in “Working Girl,” she has a “head for business and a bod for sin.” Co-owners with her sisters of several fashion boutiques, a purveyor of perfumes and cosmetics, Kim has “co-authored,” along with her two sisters, a fictional tale of their 24/7 life in the fishbowl. The gossipy look at being raw and vulnerable, misunderstood and misaligned, but still finding strength with one’s family, is aptly called “DOLLHOUSE.”

Preparing to produce her own version of the Pussycat Dolls all-girl singing troupe, presiding over a fan base that calls themselves “K Dolls,” Kim is linked with dolls—life-size or flat as paper.

When she and her sisters linked arms for the cameras recently, they posed with the world-famous, world-traveling paper doll “Flat Stanley.” Channeling the Bronte Sisters, the Kardashian sibs said it was done to raise the awareness of literacy. Or, it just might be they were glad to finally meet someone who had an even flimsier résumé before gaining global notoriety. Truthfully, only a paper doll could be more one-dimensional than most of our so-called reality stars today.