#kkinterviews

The photographer Richard Avedon once described models as “a group of underdeveloped, frightened, insecure women, most of whom have been thought ugly as children—too tall and too skinny.” Since that time, much has changed. Models have become business powerhouses and, at the top of the industry, can make tens of millions of dollars a year. What hasn’t changed is that modeling is governed by highly subjective standards. But Karlie Kloss is trying to transform that. 

After starting to model at 13 years old, Kloss learned some hard truths. “As a young model, your worth, your success or failure is based on the opinions of others about you,” says Kloss, now 29. “And you don’t have control over that. 

So, 16 years, at least 43 Vogue covers worldwide and countless campaigns for brands including Versace, Dior and Louis Vuitton later, Kloss has recast her career strategy, seizing the reins of content production and not simply waiting to appear as booked talent. It’s something akin to being an actor who produces films. This summer, Kloss switched modeling agencies, joining The Society, which also represents Amber Valletta, Adut Akech and personalities such as musician Willow Smith and reality star–turned-model Kendall Jenner. In recent years, Kloss has invested in W magazine, alongside Jason Blum and Lewis Hamilton, as well as in companies including Therabody, Mirror and Reformation.

And since last year, she has worked with Greg Propper, the co-founder of Propper Daley, a strategic social-impact and consulting agency that advises brands and philanthropists, including stars like John Legend, on social change efforts. Propper has introduced Kloss to philanthropies such as New Profit, an organization that puts together venture philanthropy funds—essentially donations that are granted to social-impact entrepreneurs. Now Kloss is working with New Profit on an ambitious new initiative, the Postsecondary Innovation for Equity (PIE), that creates career pathways for nontraditional job candidates via investments in organizations that provide skills training and mentorships. Kloss is finding that she can relate: “I’m somebody who is not formally educated. I am a student of life.”                                              

“We saw the connections in what she was looking for in her philanthropy and what we were doing in backing these entrepreneurs to help them get their ideas to scale,” says Tulaine Montgomery, co-CEO of New Profit, noting that Karlie’s own path has been unconventional. Part of the work involves several Zoom briefings a month on everything from government policy to business plans. “Karlie has been learning as much as she has been offering ideas and insights,” says Montgomery.     

Kloss also finds a source of support for her projects in her husband, the entrepreneur and investor Joshua Kushner. Their 2018 wedding made Kloss the sister-in-law of Ivanka Trump, who is married to Joshua’s brother, Jared. But during the fall 2020 election season, Kloss posted images in support of Joe Biden, along with other Democratic candidates, drawing commentary on both sides of the aisle. “I’ve had to grow really thick skin as it relates to [being] impacted by other people’s opinions,” says Kloss. “Whether they love me or they hate me—because I’ve experienced all of it. I’ve learned to stay away from the comments section. I just try and…speak out on things that I am authentically passionate about.” She has arrived at a maxim of sorts: “I live my life and try to show my values through my actions.”  

Kloss frequently collaborates directly with brands that she represents, such as designing athleisure collections for Adidas and working with Estée Lauder on a $75 Lip Kloss Kit that benefited Kode With Klossy—a program Kloss launched in 2015 offering free computer coding camps to female-identifying and nonbinary 13- to 18-year-olds. This summer, it awarded 3,000 scholarships to students from 70 countries, and she’s working to expand it further. “It is all interwoven… [even though] to somebody on the outside it might not make sense,” says Kloss via Zoom from her family’s house in Missouri, where she has traveled to celebrate her mother’s 60th birthday. Her 7-month-old son, Levi, is napping in the other room. (He’s inherited his parents’ height. “I know [Levi’s] ready to shoot some hoops,” she says.)       

“I have learned so much from her, particularly as a communicator,” says Willow Bay, dean of the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Bay met Kloss through her husband, former Disney chief Bob Iger, and has since acted as a mentor. She groups Kloss with young athletes and creators. “They communicate and engage with audiences directly and meaningfully,” Bay says. “They are thinking about life and the impact that they can have. I think investing is one way of both exploring that and building…equity and ownership stakes that will last beyond [a] modeling career.” Kloss often involves Kode With Klossy in her day job. A portion of the proceeds from a 2018 capsule collection of Away luggage by Kloss went to Kode With Klossy. She also promoted the organization while appearing as the face of a Calvin Klein collection for Amazon Fashion.  

Kloss was an early adopter of social media in the fashion industry. She was among the first models taking backstage photos and videos for her Instagram account, which she started in 2012, and later for her YouTube channel, Klossy, which she launched in 2015 (it now has 771,000 subscribers). She has about 9.8 million followers on Instagram and roughly 5.5 million on Twitter. “I’ve spent the majority of my life in front of the camera—but not my camera,” she says in her first YouTube video. “And that’s where this is different.” This drives at one of the central tensions of Kloss’s life: The very career that gives her the power to have a voice also often requires that she not talk at all. What she loves about modeling, she says, is being a canvas—collaborating to bring ideas to life. “She appreciates and respects fashion,” says Christy Turlington Burns, “its history and references, [and] she can translate it for wide audiences.”

“You tell a story without words,” says Kloss, who began modeling the summer before seventh grade when a scout spotted her at a local mall. Her freshman year at Missouri’s Webster Groves High School, she walked in a Calvin Klein show the same month school started. At her senior prom, she chose a deep orange Dior dress and stood head and shoulders above her date (Kloss is 6 feet 2 inches), a distinction that was noted by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It wasn’t so different from this year’s Met Gala, when Kloss wore a red Carolina Herrera minidress with a train and ruffled sleeves. “When I first started, I thought of it as this incredible after-school hobby,” says Kloss, who was typically chaperoned by a family member—or even once, her high school English teacher—on her early trips. “I had a key to the world. [But] I was also balancing my high school work and going to, like, lame Friday-night parties.” A turning point came when she graduated from high school in 2011. Until then, she had assumed she would follow her father’s path as a doctor. (He’s an emergency room physician, and her mother is an art director.) But Kloss had witnessed extended family go through the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. “I [had] this unique opportunity to make real income right now,” she says, “and be able to support the people that I love in a way that was unprecedented.” She took it. 

For years, she wrestled with her decision. “Is this the most important thing I could be doing with my life?” she remembers asking herself. Eventually, she realized that there was a way to harness her growing fame. “I wanted to change how I was using my job and my platform as a model,” she says. She looked to “North Stars,” such as Turlington Burns, who earned a bachelor’s degree from NYU in 1999 and later founded a maternal health nonprofit, Every Mother Counts. “I need to invest in myself in other ways, both in pursuing my education and also building things…that I’m excited about, whether for-profit or nonprofit,” Kloss says. The pandemic period, Kloss says, was an opportunity to reconsider her goals. “In fashion there are no boundaries unless you put them up,” she says, describing constant chaos and travel before Covid hit. “Maybe that was why I was able to get pregnant—for the first time I was taking care of myself.”