Kendall Jenner: The Kardashians’ Newest Superstar

She’s been rich since the day she was born. She was on TV before she could drive. She was an elite fashion model by the time she turned 18. Now Kendall Jenner is one of the most followed, most pH๏τographed people in the world—and she still might only be the third- (fourth? sixth?) most-famous person in her own family. GQ sent Zach Baron to Paris Fashion Week to try to keep up with the Kardashians’ newest superstar.

The sun rises and pours an ocean of light onto Paris one Thursday morning in early March, and Kendall Jenner is at the wheel of a Smart car, a little speed-bump-shaped contraption that contains two seats and three people. Ashleah, Kendall’s modeling agent/minder/friend, reaches out one long graceful arm to take a selfie—two artfully posed women, one bewildered man—then instructs Kendall to hang a right up the Avenue de la Grande Armée.

Kendall Jenner is 19. This is either her fourth, fifth, or sixth time in Paris in the past year, she’s not quite sure. It’s been a blur, and she’s usually here to work—she’s been to Paris, in other words, but not really. Now she’s trying to get out, see the city a bit. “There’s an arch,” Kendall says helpfully, pointing up ahead at the Arc de Triomphe.

We do a couple of doughnuts around the monument to the French war ᴅᴇᴀᴅ. Kendall, in sunglᴀsses, a pale pink shift, and Chloé sneakers, is giggling, weaving with the ease of the L.A.-born through Paris traffic like we won’t all die in a cute little explosion should our tiny car hit even a particularly large cobblestone. She has the quality unique to certain fashion models where from most vantage points she looks like someone you might have gone to high school with, and then the light touches her face in a specific way, like through the windshield just now, say, and all the hard angles and emphatic contours and one-in-a-million genetic collisions emerge. She slides us down the Champs-Élysées to Avenue George V and pulls up at the Four Seasons, where we all tumble out of the car into a sudden jarring circle of camera flashes.

I watch a candle smolder and listen to Kendall answer, “Gigi…” Gigi is Gigi Hadid, one of Kendall’s closest friends and a fellow member of a whole new generation of high-fashion models that also includes their friends Cara Delevingne, Joan Smalls, and Karlie Kloss—a team of young women who together bucked the twenty-first-century anonymity of the job to become, out of sheer will and daily Twitter updates, full-on celebrities in their own right. Supermodels, in other words, of the kind we haven’t seen since Gisele and Naomi and Kate. A gang of girls notorious for being beautiful and having fun, for treating fame like an alpine meadow full of flowers to pick and then Instagram.

Kris says she’s about to go over to Kim and Kanye’s place—she says it just like that, all casual—and then the three of them will meet Kendall at the Balmain show, this afternoon, in which Kendall is walking the runway.

Kendall, half listening, moving around the room with the restlessness of a bored teenager and the ease of someone who basically lives in H๏τel rooms, reaches into a yellow Selfridges bag and pulls out a black rabbit-fur felt hat that turns out to be the Kendall hat, a limited-edition Karl Lagerfeld-designed bit of millinery vended exclusively at Selfridges and recently purchased with pride by Kris. Kendall puts the hat on and studies herself in Kris’s mirror.

Now, maybe it’s the jet lag, but this whole scene seems symbolic. If you’ll step with me into the warm, reᴀssuring light of the Keeping Up with the Kardashians confession booth for a moment… For a while it was commonplace to point to the Jenner-Kardashians as some sort of new, depressing evolution in the form of the American family, whose desire for fame burned so H๏τ that it actually made them famous, a spray-tanned snake eating its own Swarovski-encrusted tail. This was always only partly true at best—weren’t they in fact famous for being super entertaining on television? like Jon Hamm? or Guy Fieri?—but one thing you really get, sitting in the lemon yellow Four Seasons suite, watching Kendall Jenner try on a hat named for Kendall Jenner as her proud mother looks on, is how hoary that entire conversation feels in 2015. Kendall Jenner is past all that.

Let us now behold her in her eponymous $630 hat, picking her way across the shopping-bag-strewn floor, the immaculate result of her family’s long-sought betterment, the far end of a long arc of aspiration, with the taste and bone structure to prove it. She has what we should want for our children and our children’s children: a life of steady work and good fortune. You might sneer, but it’s true. I would sacrifice a wombat for my future daughter to be in this exact suite, trying on this exact hat. It’s infectious, their comfort here. My grandfather grew up in an orphanage in Brooklyn and now I’m in Paris, taking my ease at the Four Seasons, and all my ancestors are duly proud, thank you very much. But the Jenners might as well have ridden in here on a wagon train, the extent to which they’ve been hurtling ceaselessly toward the finish line of the American Dream.

And Kendall is the family’s most refined product yet, wildly successful without even the taint of all the hard tabloid labor—Bruce’s I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! appearances and Kim’s home movie, the long, family-wide, soulful prison phone calls with Joe Francis—that brought her to this point. She is the regal JFK to her mother’s liquor-running Joe Kennedy, the beneficiary of her family’s ambition, the realization of their dreams. “My life was always different growing up,” she says. “I mean, even before the show, my dad was who he is. He’s an Olympic athlete. And we were going to premieres, like Finding Nemo premieres, and we would be little kids, like, before the show, walking down the red carpet.” As a kid, she’d visit the Neverland Ranch. “I remember going, actually, and as I was leaving, Michael Jackson was coming in. And I was like, ’Oh, my God! That was Michael Jackson!’ ”

Casually, she’ll say things like “When I was younger, we lived in a horse community.”

A horse community! America! May all our children live in horse communities.

Outside the four seasons, the paparazzi have gone kudzu and multiplied. The Jenner team has swapped our li’l Smart car for a burly Range Rover, and endearingly, as the pH๏τographers strobe away, Kendall asks the driver if he’d mind letting her take the wheel instead. Bruce taught her how to drive when she was only 10, she says; doing it now “makes me feel like I’m home.” You can tell—she drives so easily, so naturally, that it takes me a moment to realize she’s doing it within a diamond-shaped phalanx of pursuing pH๏τographers in cars and on scooters, dipping and turning circles around the Range. I get vertigo just looking out the window. But she’s grinning.

This life, the crazy caravan of borderline suicidal men trailing the car, is all she knows. Think about that! None of us choose what we are born into, but few of us are born into circumstances like hers. Grew up literally live on television, to the point where she’s not even sure if she can remember what her life was really like before Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Her mother and sisters chose this. But “me and my little sister were placed in,” Kendall says. “Like, ’Okay, there’s gonna be a TV show around.’ We didn’t have a say. And how could we have a say? It was in our home. There was no way we couldn’t be on it.”

“Like, now?” She seems genuinely surprised by the question. “If someone was like, ’Do you…?’ Honestly, I can’t answer that question. I have no idea. I don’t remember. I was 10 years old when the TV show started. I don’t remember what it was like before.”

She’s not mad at the show or how things turned out, she says. Far from it. Just re-upped with E! in fact: four more years living on-camera alongside the rest of her family in exchange for a reported $100 million. Her modeling career is now going great, and she’s not unaware that that’s got something to do with who she was before she decided to be a model. Paris in springtime, who could be mad?

The Balmain show is at Le Grand Hotel, where last year, Kendall says, “some activist, like a Save the Whales guy, body-slammed my sister Kim.” I’m kind of smirking at the absurdity of the image as she tells me this, the two of us moving through the lobby and downstairs, her giant security guard clearing us a path, but the anecdote will prove prescient, and a few hours from now I will think about Kim and her ᴀssailant and sympathize.

Hadid, Kloss, and Smalls are here. So is Adriana Lima. Thirty or forty models sitting backstage getting their cheekbones further sharpened amid artists mixing lipstick colors on metal plates with the concentration of Turner gazing out grimly at a burning ship. The big circular room, in the basement of the H๏τel, smells like coffee and glue. This week the tabloids are full of stories about Kendall being bullied by her fellow models on account of her gauche reality-television roots, but as far as I can tell, the other girls here, who uniformly look super young and super tall, are lining up to exchange air-kisses and compliments. If there’s a popular girl in this room, it’s her.

There was a moment, not too long ago, when Kendall’s modeling aspirations seemed like maybe just another reality-TV plot device, a story line as ephemeral as the episode about Kris’s inconveniently tiny bladder or the time Kim became a private eye. But then Kendall went and built an actual career—one at which she is considered genuinely gifted by those who would know. “I didn’t do it because I felt like I had to prove something,” she says, though you can tell that’s a silver lining, proving something. “This is a career that I’ve always wanted. And I mean, what else would I be doing? I probably would have gone to school to get the degree to go to work, when work was already there.”

She’s deliberately kept the E! cameras away from this part of her life. “I told them from the beginning, I was like, ’Okay, love you guys, but we’re not gonna do this. You’re not gonna follow me to shows, you’re not gonna be with me on this ride.’ ” She can’t help it if people hire her for her pre-existing fame, but she’d prefer that they didn’t—that this be hers alone.

Though now here come Kanye and Kris and Kim, a blizzard of light and noise heading toward the front row, Kim pᴀssive-aggressively picking this moment to unveil a dramatic new blonde haircut, Solange Knowles and Lewis Hamilton and Emily Ratajkowski filing in behind them, the show beginning first with opera and then with the strangled falsetto tones of Fall Out Boy. There’s carpet on the runway for some reason and Kendall breaks a heel down in the fiber, but you can’t tell; in fact, she looks exhilarated, albeit in that hyper-focused, model-face kind of way.

Afterward it’s chaos, people breaking into a run for backstage. Kendall’s back in street clothes now and I finally realize what the sunglᴀsses she’s been wearing on top of her head are for as she lowers them against the flash, a whole murder of pH๏τographers who have descended upon us shooting away about nine inches from her face.

As she tries to walk out of the building, her security guard has already been accidentally bogarted by Kris, which means Sebastian, her tiny French driver, is slugging his way through the growing throng. On the H๏τel’s front steps, we walk into a literal mob, gnashing and howling, like something out of medieval times, and Kendall is almost swept away by the crowd.

People are tugging on her sleeves and her hair, screaming her name. There are hundreds of them and she’s got her head down and she’s trying to walk as the crowd surges forward and everyone is shouting but it’s too loud to make out the words. We’re all swaying now in that fierce angry way where you know if you lose your balance you’re definitely getting trampled. I consider my obituary—”Kendall Jenner ’Companion’ Slain in Paris Melee”—and start shoving back. Kendall’s got a kind of rictus panic smile on her face, and a scene that began feeling like just another glamorous moment in the life of a glamorous woman is starting to feel a lot more dangerous. Finally there’s the car and she dives in and I dive in after her and before the car even pulls away, she’s already on the phone with Kris.

“Why the fuck would you let [poor security guard’s name redacted] leave without me, Mom! We just got fully attacked!”

Outside the car, dozens of crazed French teenagers are banging on the windows and Sebastian looks desperate, trying to floor the accelerator but also not be guilty of murder. Kendall’s calling Bruce now, maybe because Bruce is the parent who makes her feel safe. “Hi, Dad, I just got almost killed by a million kids,” she says, breathing in that hysterical way where the air won’t actually come. “I don’t know how many it was, really, but it felt like 30,000. The driver literally had to push bodies. Kend-all! Kend-all! Kend-all!…” She’s saying her own name in a French accent, repeating it over and over again, as they did when they were grabbing at her, and I look over and she’s looking down at her hands and her hands are shaking.

This next bit may seem like a borderline unsympathetic observation to make about a teenager who was nearly trampled by a mob, though I don’t mean it that way. But this is the realest moment I witness, hanging around Kendall Jenner. Part of this I’m sure is a 19-year-old’s natural walls-up reaction to a disheveled, note-taking stranger following her around all day, a certain cordial but self-protective lack of affect; part of it, though, might have to do with her family’s working definition of “real.”

One thing you quickly realize about Kendall is that she is part of not one but two reality productions—the first being the one we’re familiar with, the one for which she gets paid by E! But then it turns out there’s also a second reality show, for want of a better word, that encompᴀsses a good bit of her real (“real”?) life. As we make our way around Paris, my phone begins to vibrate with a steady stream of friends and loved ones back home who are tracking my movements through posts on TMZ and the Daily Mail. The paparazzi attention around Kendall and her family is so constant that there is essentially a real-time feed on their movements available to anyone who might be curious. As a result, simply living in the Jenner orbit—eating, moving from place to place, going out at night—becomes a kind of performance.

I can’t figure out if Kendall is completely aware of and at ease with this fact (likely) or she’s been so consistently exposed to it from such a young age that she doesn’t notice it at all. And when I ask about the show itself, and its “reality” or lack thereof, we might as well be speaking two different languages.

What happened was this: I wondered if she ever felt like she was playing a character on Keeping Up with the Kardashians, like there was some more authentic self that maybe she saved for off-camera. Her answer: “No, not at all.”

“It’s completely me,” she says, about the person you see on television. “I don’t know how I’d have to play a character.”