Karlie Kloss Gets Candid About Politics, Her Relationship, and Women in Tech
“Do you think they can see me?” says Karlie Kloss in a whisper that registers somewhere between excitement and panic. “I just don’t want to ruin the surprise!” The six-foot-two-inch supermodel is doing her best to hide, crouching behind one of numerous bookshelves dotted around the light-filled classroom in Beaver Country Day School. It’s the first time that Kode with Klossy, her summer camp for teenage girls interested in tech, has come to the Boston area, and the fifteen or so students—“Klosstons,” as they’re calling themselves—are taking a five-minute movement break from their HTML tutorial, bopping along to “Cupid Shuffle,” the popular line-dancing anthem. They have no idea that the überfamous camp leader is literally in their midst. Pretty soon the jig is up, though: Someone has spotted Kloss’s Kelly-green Céline pants peeking through a row of textbooks. “Karlie’s here!” screams one of the girls at the top of her lungs. Pandemonium ensues. Kloss leaps to the front of the class with her hands in the air, raising her voice above the hullabaloo: “Surprise!”
Computer science doesn’t have a reputation for being this much fun, especially not among high school girls, but Kloss is hoping to change that. Over the course of just four summers, her camp has grown from an intimate classroom of 20 in New York to a nationwide program offering scholarships to 1,000 young women across 25 cities. According to the National Center for Women & Information Technology, women account for only 18 percent of computer and information-science graduates and are largely underrepresented in Silicon Valley as a result, making up about 30 percent of workers in the tech industry as a whole. Plus, there is troubling evidence to suggest that the gender gap is only widening: A report published by the NCWIT in 2016 found that the number of women in computing has in fact been in steady decline since the early 1990s, with a quit rate more than double that of men—41 percent compared with 17 percent. And that makes initiatives like this more important than ever. “The gender gap within tech is a persistent problem that we won’t solve without all of us championing the cause and actively working toward more representation,” says Susan Wojcicki, who since joining YouTube as CEO in 2014 has helped raise the percentage of women working at the company from 24 to 30 percent. That sentiment is echoed by Reshma Saujani, a lawyer and the former deputy public advocate for New York City, whose nonprofit organization Girls Who Code paved the way for initiatives like Kloss’s. Since launching in NYC in 2012, Girls Who Code has reached 90,000 students in 50 states with summer-camp programs and after-school clubs starting in third grade. Saujani believes that exposing young women to a broader spectrum of female role models will play a key role in closing the gap. “This one-dimensional image of what a coder looks like has got to end, and pop culture can help with that,” says Saujani. “Look at what someone like Shonda Rhimes did for medicine and law. We forget that women made up only 10 percent of lawyers in the 1970s.”
At face value, Kloss may appear an unlikely poster child for the women-in-tech movement: Supermodels have historically pivoted toward more fashionable endeavors, as designers (Kate Moss for Topshop; Gigi Hadid for Tommy Hilfiger) or wellness gurus (Gisele, Miranda Kerr). That Kloss has beaten a path from the runway to the most nerdy reaches of the internet superhighway makes her something of a unicorn. “Karlie isn’t who most people picture when they hear the words computer nerd, but that’s exactly what helps her reach the girls she does,” says Melinda Gates, who first met Kloss at a tech conference in 2016. “She’s proof that tech entrepreneurs don’t need to fit any one mold.”
Raised by an artist mother and a doctor father, Kloss had childhood dreams of becoming a pediatrician. “I always identified myself as a girl who was good at math and science,” she says, an image her sister Kristine, the oldest of the four Kloss sisters, confirms. “We used to joke that Karlie was the nerdy one,” says Kristine, a marketing executive for Marc Jacobs Beauty. “Imagine an adorable first-grader having fun with science experiments; that was Karlie every day. She loved learning.” Educating herself in the world of modeling was the bigger challenge, says Kloss. “I always thought, Well, I’m not artistic; that doesn’t come easily to me. And it’s funny that I had to learn the language of fashion because of my job, but it was hard for me.”
Kloss was catapulted into the fashion spotlight a little over a decade ago, when she was just fifteen. Navigating the scene as a gawky, doe-eyed teenager from suburban St. Louis was hardly child’s play, though the most challenging moment in her career would come later, when she was virtually a household name. “I started taking birth control, and my body became more womanly—hips and thighs appeared,” says Kloss, who went from a size 0 to a size 4/6 over the course of a year. “I started losing jobs; I wasn’t getting booked for the runway; designers stopped working with me. It felt as if my world had been turned upside down.” Though the conversation around size and age diversity is rapidly evolving, her frustrations are still all too familiar in the modeling industry, where the pressure to maintain prepubescent dimensions can be crushing. For Kloss, it was the earth-shattering jolt that would ultimately propel her in an unexpected new direction. “I’d always measured myself against Gisele—to me she was the pinnacle of modeling success—and that was not productive,” she says. “That’s when I had a breakthrough: I realized it was time for me to do me, to embrace the things that make me who I am.”
In her soul-searching, Kloss found her way back to the classroom. She enrolled in NYU and took a coding course at the Flatiron School. “I had a major aha moment when I realized how creative code was,” she says. Kloss would end up taking classes at the tech academy on her days off long after the introductory program was over. “I didn’t know who Karlie was at first; I just noticed that she was very tall,” says Flatiron School cofounder Avi Flombaum. “I was really impressed that she kept coming back—she could be doing a million other things. She really took to it.” It was at Flombaum’s suggestion that Kloss started the scholarship, and he’s been instrumental in shaping and expanding the camp’s curriculum.
Kloss was an early adopter of Instagram and steadily built her following to seven and half million. She hopped on the YouTube train ahead of the game, too—her fashion-and-lifestyle channel now boasts close to three-quarters of a million subscribers. Her Instagram account is an expertly curated world in which exotic vacation selfies happily coexist with Kloss’s professional projects and socially conscious calls to action. “Before the dawning of social media, I think the role of the model was more to be seen. I’ve always wanted to use my voice for positive impact,” she says. “Now I can speak in real time.”
That said, Kloss has been markedly silent on the knottier aspects of her private life that have made headlines in the last few months. She kept her engagement to venture capitalist Joshua Kushner quiet for a month before revealing it on Instagram this past June. (“The proposal was romantic and sweet. We spent the weekend in upstate New York, just the two of us,” says Kloss, who has been with Kushner, 33, since she was nineteen, after they were seated next to each other at a friend’s dinner party.) When Ivanka Trump posted a congratulatory comment on the social-media announcement, referring to Kloss as her “sister,” the tabloid rumor mill was immediately churning. Trump converted to Orthodox Judaism before marrying Jared Kushner (the family is known to be observant), real estate developer and senior adviser to her father. Had Kloss done the same? How close were the two women?
The implications of this high-profile union—and her by-default connection to the contentious Trump presidency—are not lost on Kloss. “At the end of the day, I’ve had to make decisions based on my own moral compass—forget what the public says, forget social media,” she says, neither confirming nor denying the conversion rumors. “I’ve chosen to be with the man I love despite the complications. It’s frustrating, to be honest, that the spotlight is always shifted away from my career toward my relationship. I don’t think the same happens in conversations with men.”
Still, the couple has been relatively open about their political leanings. Kushner has been described as a lifelong Democrat, raising hundreds of millions for Oscar, the Obamacare start-up. He also attended the March for Our Lives gun-control demonstration in Washington, D.C., with Kloss earlier this year. “Josh and I share a lot of the same liberal values that guide our lives and the things we stand for,” says Kloss, who Instagrammed about Hillary Clinton—#ImWithHer—during the last election. “We’ve really grown together personally and professionally. Josh knows that I’m just a nerdy, curious human being. I think that’s why he loves me. We have each other’s back.”
It goes without saying that Kushner was an early supporter of Kloss’s computer-science dreams. He took that first coding class with her, along with one of the couple’s mutual male friends. Though she’s loath to admit it, you get the sense that she outshone them both. Watching Kloss float around the summer camp, giving pointers to students who are busy brainstorming their final project ideas in small groups (there’s a fan site for The Bachelor percolating in one corner, and an app to match new drivers with secondhand cars in the other), makes it clear she’s in her element here.
The supermodel is reluctant to look too deeply into the crystal ball of her future. “The truth is, I don’t know where I’ll be a decade from now. Nothing about the last ten years has gone exactly to plan, which is part of the beauty of life,” she says.
“When I was fifteen growing up in St. Louis, I didn’t know anything about fashion or coding—I had never even been on a plane! I hope the next ten years bring as many surprises and adventures, and that no matter what I’m doing, I’m happy, healthy, and surrounded by loved ones. I want to continue to work in fashion, build a thriving business, create access to education for young women, and hopefully make an impact in the world along the way.” She’s taken several of the camp’s alumnae under her wing since the beginning, including Tallie Elisha, a soft-spoken instructor assistant from New Jersey who’s in town to help the Klosstons and is eager to show me a website that some of her classmates made a couple of years ago, called Get Informed, Yo. “It pulls together information from the internet on the bills that are moving through Congress in real time—we call that scraping,” she explains timidly. “Why don’t you show her the website you made?” suggests Kloss with the affectionate nudge of a big sister.
Elisha blushes deeply before pulling up Code2Cure on her laptop, the program she created to help connect pediatric-cancer patients with other children in hospitals. “It can get really boring and lonely in the hospital when you’re a kid, ” says Elisha, seventeen, who was diagnosed with leukemia when she was eleven and spent a good chunk of her middle school years recovering. Indeed, the camp afforded her an academic sisterhood when she needed it most. “There is something really powerful about being in a classroom of girls, of having a network of female connectivity,” says Kloss, who is hovering by the window, iPhone in hand, awaiting a FaceTime call from a classroom of young Klossy scholars in Dallas. “Being able to open the door for them, that really fills my cup.”
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Photographed by Chien-Chi Chang for Magnum Photos.
Produced by Annalora von Pentz.
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