Kendall Jenner, the ‘Model of Her Generation,’ Gets the September Cover of Vogue
While Estée Lauder was generous enough to buy Kendall Jenner her own solo supplement of Vogue, Jenner has now reached that milestone without the help of a cosmetics company. The reality star and model was selected by Anna Wintour to grace the cover of the magazine’s September issue, arguably the most important month of the year for a fashion glossy.
The 20-year-old millionaire has been live-documented by television cameras and iPhones since she was in elementary school. Profiled in the magazine by Jonathan Van Meter, she reveals what life is like now that she’s the “Breakout Model of Her Generation.” This includes driving around West Hollywood to Calabasas to Malibu in a 1957 Corvette Stingray (her dad, who publicly transitioned from Bruce to Caitlyn Jenner last year, taught her to drive stick when she was 16), and on the professional end of things, the fittings in Paris with Givenchy’s Riccardo Tisci. Kendall is still a tomboy aching for privacy in a Snapchat and paparazzi-filled world.
So although she is a star in an industry in which caring about clothing, hair, and makeup is just in a day’s work, she still loves dressing down and having her private life. And while she admits to being “superdifferent” from her siblings Kourtney, Kim, and Khloé Kardashian, she still credits them with keeping her and 19-year-old Kylie grounded. “If I’m being honest, my little sister and I have every right to go crazy,” she said. “You would expect that from us. But neither of us has the desire to do that. I think it says a lot about the way we were raised. Not even just by my parents, but my Kardashian sisters and what they’ve taught us. My parents did something right, and thank God.”
But her parents, specifically her father, have not made the past year very easy. “I knew it was going to have its rough phase,” she said. “But it’s all supernormal now. It’s not weird at all. Sometimes I look at a picture of my dad when she was a guy, and it makes me a little sad — I get emotional. You have to get past it: You’ve got a new person to love. It’s kind of a blessing in disguise, if that’s not the wrong way to say it.”
Kendall, whose family has experienced more than its fair share of drama, says the Kardashians are “very accepting of people and being different and being who you are.” However, she acknowledges that it is surreal to have a hypermasculine parent completely change course. “It is definitely a gnarly experience. But my whole life we would, like, catch her, and we would be like, ‘What is going on here? I think we know, but do we?’” Kendall explains that she and Kylie thought Bruce was cheating on Kris because he had makeup and nail polish and even found “those squishy boob things” and wigs.
“One time I actually ran into her,” Kendall said. “She had no idea. She would wake up really early just so she could dress up and move around the house and get that little kick for the morning, and then go back to being Bruce — take us to school, totally normal.” Then one morning, Kendall woke up to get some water at 4 a.m. and saw her dad coming down the stairs dressed up in “the full nine.” “And she didn’t see me. I literally froze. Please don’t turn left. Because she could either turn left or right. Thank God she turned right and — to this day! — has no idea that happened,” she said. “That was the first time I had ever seen her. … My mom knew. She knew since their third date.”
Kris, for her part, is apparently exactly as she seems on TV. “She’s tough on all of us, to be honest — she’s a mom-ager,” Kendall concedes. It might be Kris’s job to heap praise on her daughter, but plenty of others chimed in as well. “She’s very special,” Tisci said. She is literally the American dream of today. She’s approachable. Her style is very strong — you can see by the way she puts clothes together; you can see it in the paparazzi pictures. She is always dressed in a cool way. She is the one who started the new era, no?” Cindy Crawford also says of Kendall, “She’s not giving her power away.” She adds: “She’s already light years ahead of where I was at her age. It took me a while to own that.”
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