Zoe Delaney, 15, holds up her drawing of Kim Kardashian, with Cody Bice, 17, at Westfield shopping centre in Parramatta on Saturday. Photograph: Monica Tan/Guardian Australia

“Honestly? I find her the most fascinating, most interesting person,

Whitford and his mother left Brisbane two days ago, driving for 11.5 hours to reach Sydney. We are minutes away from Kardashian’s scheduled arrival and Whitford has clocked up nearly 21 hours waiting in line. And he wasn’t even the first to arrive – one group has been waiting more than 30 hours.

“We just camped out, underneath Macca’s. We all had doonas and stuff,” he says. “I think I got about two hours’ sleep.”

Whitford has been a fan of Kardashian and the reality show Keeping Up with the Kardashianssince he was “old enough to realise what the show was”. Of the show’s cast – which includes Kim’s four sisters Kourtney, Khloé, Kendall and Kylie – Whitford says Kim has always been his favourite. “I’ve bought every single magazine they’ve been in and I own every season on DVD, every biography.”

There are certain celebrities that come to define a moment in time. They attract a disproportionate amount of media attention, of fans and of haters. Their movements seem to have the Midas touch – or illustrate the downfall of society, depending on how you see it.

Among the cultural elite – the haters, let’s call them – Kardashian has become shorthand for junky celebrity culture. At the decidedly highbrow Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Kardashian came up in two of the panels I attended: journalist Anne Manne used her as a prime example of a narcissist, and the following day when Salman Rushdie was askedif the novel, in comparison to television, is an inherently elitist form, he joked: “I mean compared to Jersey Shore, yes, compared to anything with people whose name begin with K – except Kafka – yes, Kim Kafka.”

The contempt directed at Kardashian is coming from a specific class (a point made by Rushdie’s fellow panelist Emily Nussbaum, television critic for the New Yorker) as well as falling on generational and racial fault lines. Kardashian herself is dual heritage (her father, OJ Simpson’s defence lawyer, is Armenian American) and now one-half of the world’s most famous interracial couple. And it is no accident that Kardashian’s Sydney “meet and greet” has been staged in one of city’s most ethnically diverse areas, Parramatta, the heart of the sprawling, suburban west.

The crowd is predominantly young and female, and at least half seem to be from non-English-speaking backgrounds. They are mini-Kim Kardashians – stylish, enthusiastic and hungry for recognition. And when they discuss “Kim” comments are less about her blinged-out lifestyle and more about her perceived qualities.

One group of teenagers talk excitedly over one another: “She’s a good businesswoman and an entrepreneur”, “a good person”, “great mother, great wife” and “an amazing fashion sense, she’s always – ” two of the girls finish simultaneously, “on point”.

Twenty-year-old Liana Wilson knows that not everyone sits on the Kardashian love train, but that frankly, haters be jealous . “I’m a big fan of Kim Kardashian: her big arse, her ego, her relationship with Kanye. She inspires me to be confident like her. And to squat and get an arse like Kim’s.”

The women call her “flawless”, a word that has come to be associated with a modern era of diva culture. Where once “diva” was used to denigrate women that were considered out of line – bold ladies of spectacle and ambition – it has since been reclaimed by modern pop feminists. In the lyricsof that other sleek, stylish career mother, and one-half of a power couple, Beyoncé: “Diva is a female version of a hustler.”

I ask the women: is Kardashian a diva? “Only in a good way” comes one reply. “She likes to flaunt it, which makes her Kim,” says another. “It’s about being confident in yourself. And no matter what you wear or what you put on your face, if you’re confident you’ll look good.”

A decade ago Kardashian was just another Los Angeles socialite. She began her stratospheric rise after she became a stylist to the original millennial It Girl, Paris Hilton.

Since then, Kardashian has been travelling the 21 stcentury fame trail that Hilton mapped out: the leaked sex tape (in Kardashian’s case with singer Ray J), reality television and, finally, branded products and endorsements. She is a saleswoman peddling products – be it on television, print, social media or on Saturday in Sydney at an in-store promotion.

Accessibility, or at least the appearance of it, is key to Kardashian charm and has helped her surpass Hilton in the fame stakes. Despite her privileged upbringing, her bombastic, superego rapper husband, or that travelling wardrobe of designer threads, Kardashian works hard to convey that in many ways, she’s just like you. And you could totally be friends – in fact you are – on Instagramand Twitter, the social media channels where Kardashian excels.

Hilton was deemed beautiful and vain but unruly – a bit trashy, a party girl who slept around. That was 2003, but post-GFC even the famous-for-being-famous must have the appearance of industry. In 2011, Kardashian began dating the hardest worker in hip-hop, Kanye West. Her style shifted, swapping big hair and bandage dresses for a slicked-back do and pencil skirts, and with a baby on the way, began to spin a different narrative: the sophisticated wife, the working mother.

Kardashian has adopted her husband’s name (she is now Kim Kardashian West), although in a recent appearance on Ellenrecalls introducing herself to new neighbours by her maiden name and being corrected on the spot. “Kanye was standing right behind me and took a step up and said ‘West’, and I was like, ‘oh yeah, Kardashian West’,” she said to host, Ellen Degeneres.

The couple and their baby lived with Kardashian’s mother while renovating a new Bel Air home. By anchoring her affluent lifestyle with tales of ordinariness (many of us can relate to moving back in with our parents, of diaper-changing and drunken bridesmaids), Kardashian hints at a world of opulence while never alienating her fans.

When Kardashian arrives at Westfield Parramatta punctually at 2.30pm, she does so to several minutes of deafening screams. She is wearing a blazing orange dress, her skin sprayed to a mid-summer bronze. “I always get so nervous coming to an appearance without my sisters because I don’t know if anyone is going to show up,” she purrs modestly.

The crowd go bananas when she interrupts to take a video selfie. I spot Whitford standing next to two girls and they are all crying. Kardashian poses for several minutes for a scrum of photojournalists. It looks bizarre in the flesh, to see her frozen but rotating ever so slightly, like a high-end model car on display, but I have no doubt the pictures will turn out great.

Kardashian now has 200 meet and greetsto complete (400 more have also been admitted in line, without guarantee the star will see them). Every fan was required to buy a product from the Kardashian Kollection – a range of low-priced shoes, handbags and jewellery – although quite a few have opted for the minimum spend of $12 on fake eyelashes.

Nearby, 17-year-old Larisa Burgio is sniffing and dabbing at the tears in her eyes. “It’s honestly a dream come true,” she tells me.

Standing with Burgio is Dan Murace, 16 and Casey Dummett, 35. The three are out and proud “Dash Dolls” – the tribal name of Kardashian fans (Beyoncé has the Beyhive, Justin Beiber’s Beliebers and Smilers are fans of Miley Cyrus). They call themselves best friends even though they only met face to face the night before at Kanye West’s Sydney concert.

Their fandom happens primarily on Twitter, with mother-of-two Dummett tweeting under the handle @Aussie_Kardash. She has almost 11,000 followers, and last week tattooed the word “Khlover”– in dedication to Kim’s sister Khloe – on her wrist (her husband’s name is on the other).

Murace tells me he’s spent more than $250 on the last two days alone, no small sum for a kid in high school. His extended Kardashian West weekend began at 6am on Thursday when he caught “two buses and a train” to reach Sydney airport in the hope of catching the pair fly in. When that failed, he travelled to the CBD because “something was telling me I have to get off at Circular Quay and I have to go to the Park Hyatt”.

What sounds like a psychic connection to his Kardashian goddess can be explained a little more prosaically (“that’s where I met Khloe last time”), and Murace, along with Burgio, were rewarded for their efforts when Kardashian’s bodyguard “Pascal” recognised the fan and hugged him. “I know all the assistants, the bodyguards, the make-up artists, Kanye’s team – all of it,” says Murace.

Say what you will about Kim and Kanye, they are difficult to ignore. And for every sneering media storyor Mean Girls-esque online comment, the pair continue to aggressively plant new stakes in our cultural landscape. They have broken free from the confines of pop music and reality television and unapologetically established themselves as players in the worlds of fashion, art and retail.

Controversy will always swirl around the disruption of the status quo. The latest pillar of polite society to bow to the crushing forces of the Kardashian Wests was that standard bearer of high-end fashion, Vogue magazine, which put the pair on the April 2014 cover. The editorial decision unleashed a storm of outrage, with Wintour defending the cover in a charming letter, excerpted here:

Part of the pleasure of editing Vogue, one that lies in a long tradition of this magazine, is being able to feature those who define the culture at any given moment, who stir things up, whose presence in the world shapes the way it looks and influences the way we see it. I think we can all agree on the fact that that role is currently being played by Kim and Kanye to a T. (Or perhaps that should be to a K?)

There were rumours – entirely in the realm of possibility, but wholly unsubstantiated – that West had been pressing Wintour to have his wife grace the cover. It is a pretty bit of urban mythology that buys into West as the self-aggrandising rhino, charging headfirst into the gated community of New York publishing and demanding a place at the table.

But the reality is that all cultural gatekeepers risk irrelevancy when they fail to take notice of the word on the street. Putting an African-American rapper and his juicy-bottomed half-Armenian wife on the cover of a magazine that usually features willowy, pale ingénues is fashion-catching up, not fashion-forward.

And the style with which the pair have made themselves known – Kardashian’s 24-hour selfie-stream, West’s proclamations of greatness– may not be to everyone’s taste, but sometimes it takes a little razzle-dazzle to be heard. Especially when you’re part of a demographic so rarely given the distinction. As one fan tells me, “I hated saying I was Armenian, until Kim.”

The last word should go to Whitford, who I catch immediately after he’s had his 15-second tête-à-tête with his idol. “She’s so gorgeous, she’s honestly so much more real in person.” He is babbling excitedly, piling on adjective after adjective, as if alone they fail to do justice to the woman they are being attributed to.

“She is the most beautiful, most gorgeous person. She’s perfection in a woman, she’s amazing … No words can describe her.”
• This article was amended on 15 September to correct a sentence that stated Kardashian is mixed-race, and that she married West in 2011.