Kendall Jenner Is In Her Feelings
At first glance, there was nothing atypical about the pH๏τos Kendall Jenner shared following her New Year’s trip to Barbados: of string ʙικιɴιs and gauzy dresses, palm trees in silhouette against sunsets, wine glᴀsses clanking, fireworks popping. But if you were searching for a dissonant note, you might find it in the copy of The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s wrenching 2005 memoir of grief and loss, splayed on the green canvas of Jenner’s sun lounger.
“Somebody said, ‘Damn, that’s a beach read for you?!’ ” she recalls. “I would read a few pages on the sand, and then my friends would come out and they’d be like, ‘Take a sH๏τ!’ ”
A meditation on the peculiar tricks an imagination may play to avoid a goodbye surely chafed against the spirit of the party weekend. But such mental toggling is classic Kendall Jenner. The heavy stuff bubbles up to the point of overflowing, and that’s when friends and sisters and horses and other salves come to the rescue. “It’s kind of interesting that we’re wired to not think about death all the time,” Jenner muses. “And yet we don’t know the concept of never-ending. We can’t visualize a never-ending universe, but at the same time, nothing scares me more than the end of something. I’m so bad at goodbyes.” She catches herself and starts to laugh. What better defense against the dark than humor? “These are the thoughts that creep into my mind. I can’t let myself get too deep into them, or else I spiral.”
“I’m not going to sit here and act like everything’s perfect. That’s life—I’m always going to be in and out of those feelings.”
Such is the tenor of the chatter one day in early spring on Jenner’s back patio, in her home in a gated enclave at the crest of Beverly Hills, halfway between the twin fulcrums of her life: Calabasas (her hometown) and Los Angeles International Airport. The sky is a blue that occurs in Los Angeles only after the rain has rinsed the atmosphere of all man-made ᴀssaults. A month earlier, a mudslide landed in and was essentially contained by her swimming pool, though a breeze seen in the surface ripples and heard in the fruit trees and palms has made this a distant memory.
Mud in the water is an apt metaphor for that habit of mind that has been Jenner’s burden since she was a little girl. “I’m a negative thinker,” she says. “That’s my problem. I’m always worrying about something that may never happen.” Sunshine filters in wide stripes through the dark wooden pergola above us, but there is a chill in the air, and Jenner sits with her knees up and her legs tucked completely inside a giant gray wool sweater from The Row. (“I don’t wear anything else,” she says, exaggerating, though street style observers can confirm that Jenner has made a decisive shift into quiet luxury these last months.) She sees no reason not to say plainly that I have caught her in the middle of a rough patch. “I don’t see why I shouldn’t be honest about it. In my career right now I feel really stable, really hopeful. But I’ve had a tough two months. I haven’t been myself, and my friends see it. I’m more sad than usual. I’m way more anxious than usual. So I’m not going to sit here and act like everything’s perfect. That’s life—I’m always going to be in and out of those feelings. In past interviews, when someone’s asked me about my mental state, it’s always been, ‘I’m great right now, but this is what I’ve dealt with.’ Well, right now I’m actually in it.”
Because Jenner developed in the great Kardashian public image incubator, habitually in front of the camera since Keeping Up With the Kardashians premiered when she was 11 (now simply called The Kardashians), she is a master of the art of talking about feelings while distilling out the facts that might have shaped them. Boyfriends? Breakups? She knows much better than to go there. “Let’s just say it’s personal-life-journey stuff,” she says. “I’m a stresser and a control freak by nature. I’ll thank my mom for that one. This is also kind of a transitional period for me. I’m 28 now, and I think I’m in my Saturn return.” (For the astrologically uninclined, Saturn, which revolves around the sun every 29.5 years, is the planet of wisdom and personal responsibility, and so a Saturn return involves the shaking off of external influences such as parents, teachers, and bosses, and becoming superintendent of one’s own life.) “I’m so tired emotionally, but I think it’s good. It’s almost like I’m purging something for my 30s. That’s my theory.”
If transitions sound a little bit like goodbyes, it’s no wonder Jenner should find herself psychically wobbly. This year marks her 10th anniversary as a model, a time for celebration and also, perhaps, recalibration. Though there was ᴀssorted juvenilia—a Forever 21 campaign, covers of American Cheerleader and Teen Prom—Jenner regards landing Marc Jacobs’s fall 2014 show as the true beginning of her career. Eyebrow-less, bewigged, in a sheer brown V-neck T-shirt that left no nipple to the imagination, she was as anonymous as her already operational fame permitted. “I really went into that season thinking, I don’t know how this is going to go, but I’m just going to try,” she recalls. “Then I booked Marc Jacobs, and I thought, Cool, if this is all I get, I can go home happy.” Then Riccardo Tisci of Givenchy called. And soon after, Chanel. “That was kind of like, What the fuck? This is crazy. This is actually happening. I remember the excitement and the disbelief of that time. And from there the takeoff was really fast.”
In a fickle business, her power has proven uncommonly durable; Jenner is the world’s highest paid model for six years running. And while her family’s celebrity may have provided entrée, or at least invited curiosity, it was not an unalloyed advantage. Back then, the Kardashian name evoked either a luxe-suburban vapidity or a meretricious Hollywood style, neither of which had the warm embrace of the fashion atelier. Marc Jacobs remembers having to rise above that initial skepticism when the stylist Katie Grand, his longtime collaborator, suggested he meet Jenner.
“Katie knew me well enough to know that I wasn’t excited by the Kardashian fame,” he explains. “I just wasn’t, to be very honest. I was aware of who they were. There was no judgment. But I have a job to do, a fashion show, and that means finding models who can show the clothes the way I think they should be shown. That show was very much about the uniformity of the cast. Some are more about individuality and maybe exaggerating different models’ features and personalities. But in this one there was this almost narcotic-like pull to the thing. It was this army of the same person. Kendall couldn’t be Kendall Jenner at all. It was really about anonymity—which is kind of ironic, and that irony appeals to me.”
It appealed to Jenner too because she was so eager to prove people wrong. “I think they didn’t believe in me when I came into the industry. That’s been a constant narrative in the hater world online, and at times that’s been really hard,” she acknowledges. “But I always say, I like being a pleasant surprise. I like that motivation in a way—like, Oh, you thought? You thought! Fashion is always shifting. There are always new vibes and energies. When I came into it, you didn’t really see quote-unquote famous girls. Cara Delevingne was probably the biggest one who was known outside of modeling. She opened that door for me, and from there it blew up into a whole new thing. Now there’s another vibe coming through. You’re seeing a lot of social media creators at the shows. It’s great. It’s always just shifting and changing, and you take it day by day. I suss out the vibe. Does it align with me? If it still does, great. You don’t know what’s around the corner.”
Jacobs feels that while some designers look to leverage the fame of their models, as has lately occurred with the reappearance on runways of the ’90s Supers, there is a real risk that the clothes themselves will disappear beneath those outsize auras. (Addressing this distortion, Jacobs’s fall 2024 show had models walk among an oversized table and chairs by the artist Robert Therrien, as if to make them small again.) “When you put Kendall or Kaia or Gigi or Bella in a show, you can expect that most of what you will read online the following day is about those four people being in the show,” he says. “You will know very little about the collection. I think that’s problematic. But this idea of a personality as a great model is just where we’re at. What might have been the story in the 1970s, with a Lauren Hutton, who started off as a model and became super well-known as a model—now things are different. I think Kendall’s beautiful. She wears clothes with confidence. I think she’s also super nice and charming. She pH๏τographs well. She has all the things, but then also this thing that makes her very of this moment, this reality-celebrity thing. There are two ways you can deal with that. You can say, I don’t want anything to do with this, or say, This is real and I can embrace it. I think that’s the way you go with Kendall.”
