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.
Upstairs, Kendall knocks on a door, and on the other side of that door is her mother, Kris Jenner, wearing nothing but a leopard-print robe. Her hair is wet and slicked back, her skin moist and well oiled. “Come in,” she says, in the airy death-threat tones I know so well from television. There is a bowl of ripe fruit, Chanel shopping bags strewn across the lemon yellow carpet. A gentleman stylist works away at her hair as she bids me to sit down. Kris turns to Kendall with great interest: “Who did you go out with last night?”
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.”
