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. 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. 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. 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. North’s younger siblings take turns zipping around their sister on the fleet of motorized toy cars at their disposal.

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. 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.

When Mother Kimberly does appear shortly thereafter, her arrival is so casual that the energy on the shoot barely shifts.