Against all expectations and arguably all logic, Kim Kardashian is now the most popular skin in Fortnite this season, and not by a slim margin. According to usage data, she is winning so hard that the rest of the cosmetics may want to file a missing persons report.
Despite only appearing in the Item Shop a little over a week ago, the Kim Kardashian skin has surged to the top of Chapter 7, Season 1 usage charts. This means that in a game famous for crossovers involving superheroes, anime legends, cartoon dads, and sentient memes, the most-used character right now is a real-world celebrity whose primary combat experience does not traditionally involve shotguns or building ramps at unsafe speeds.
Fortnite has never been subtle about its willingness to collaborate with absolutely anything that exists, has existed, or might exist in a marketing meeting. Still, even by Fortnite standards, the arrival of Kim Kardashian raised eyebrows. There was no tie-in movie, no game release, no major narrative event. She simply appeared, ready to drop into a battle royale with 99 strangers and a dream.
And yet, the numbers are hard to argue with. Tracking data from Fortnite.GG shows that Kardashian’s “Iconic” skin has already been used by more than 2.4 million players. That represents nearly four percent of the game’s active population, which is an astonishing figure for a cosmetic that is not included in the battle pass and must be purchased with V-Bucks. Free skins usually dominate these charts. Kim Kardashian did not need to be free. She merely needed to exist.
Epic Games has indirectly supported the scale of this adoption, stating that more than 37 million matches have been played using the skin. Even accounting for the usual caveats around publicly shared metrics, the gap between Kardashian and the rest of the season’s lineup is wide enough to make second place feel like an entirely different competition.
Other recent skins barely register by comparison. Playboi Carti appears further down the list with under a million users. The Bride, positioned as a major figure in the current battle pass, trails significantly. Marty McFly, a character with decades of pop culture goodwill and a time machine, is languishing somewhere around 63rd place, presumably wondering where it all went wrong.
The takeaway here is less about Kardashian herself and more about what Fortnite has become. Cosmetic choices are no longer about immersion or theme consistency. They are about recognition, irony, screenshots, and the quiet satisfaction of eliminating someone while dressed as a global celebrity who has absolutely no narrative reason to be there.
Whether this dominance lasts is another question. Fortnite trends move quickly, and today’s must-have skin is tomorrow’s locker clutter. But for now, Kim Kardashian is running the island, and the data suggests that millions of players are perfectly fine with that outcome. Fortnite may be a shooter, but it remains, above all else, a popularity contest.
