Glazed expression: Kim Strapless Wedding Dresses Kardiashian on the cover of Paper magazine Photograph: Jean-Paul Goude/Paper magazine

With a brief to “break the internet”, New York-based style magazine Paper has unveiled their latest cover – an oiled Kim Kardashian displaying her naked backside.

In fact, there are two covers – the second is a more demure shot showing Kim fully clothed and balancing a glass of champagne on her bum.

While Kardashian – with her trajectory from sex tape to reality star to the cover of Vogue, and now back to her birthday suit – is a very 21st-century kind of celebrity, the photographer, Jean-Paul Goude, did his pioneering work in the 70s and 80s. The champagne shot is a recreation of a 1976 photograph of model Carolina Burmont.

Made art director of Esquire in 1969, despite having little experience laying out pages, Goude’s career took a different turn when he met Grace Jones in 1977 (or ’78 – the photographer can’t remember as “it was a period of decadence”).

Jones was a Jamaican model with stunning androgynous looks. A dedicated hedonist and habituee of Studio 54, she had already made a disco album and was massively popular on the New York gay scene.

“She was singing her hit song I Need a Man to a roomful of shrieking, gay bobbysoxers,” remembered Goude. “The ambiguity of her act was that she herself looked like a man. A man singing I Need a Man to a bunch of men.”

Goude not only fell in love with her, but decided to take control of her image, treating her a bit like a living artwork. Decades before photoshop, armed with little more than his own surrealist, sexually charged vision and a steady hand, Goude created astonishing images of Jones with the primitive technology available at the time – not much more than scalpels, glue and multiple contact sheets. You can see him at work in the very first seconds of this video for Jones’s Slave to the Rhythm.

He described the process in his book Jungle Strapless Wedding Dresses Fever, copies of which now go for hundreds of pounds. “I photographed her in different positions. I cut her legs apart, lengthened them, turned her body to face the audience.” For the cover of her third album, Nightclubbing, which abandoned disco for a much more avant-garde fusion of reggae and new wave, Goude turned Jones’s already dark skin blue-black, making her look forbidding, masculine, and drop dead cool.

Goude and Jones’s work is still deeply influential; moments from the live concert they created, called A One Man Show, regularly crop up in film, advertising and other live concerts.

However, even at the time he was criticised for objectifying the bodies of black women. Kim Kardashian’s enlarged, glazed buttocks show that while his techniques have changed – he almost certainly used a computer – his predilections have not, only now they seem to be shared by the whole of the internet.