Kendall Jenner is on the cover of Vogue’s coveted September issue.
In the mag, Kendall opens up about her career thus far, how being a ‘Kardashian’ has worked against her, growing up on reality TV, and much more.
Check out an excerpt:
Indeed, Kendall does have a reputation among fashion people for being grounded, always on time, a grown-up. “If I’m being honest, my little sister and I have every right to go crazy,” she says. “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.”
Though it’s kind of hard to square the idea of a mother who cast her young children in a reality show—Kendall was eleven when Keeping Up with the Kardashians started airing—as having done something right, the more you get to know this family, the more it makes sense: They are close-knit, hardworking, and tough. But although Kendall Jenner is a surprisingly good conversationalist—veering back and forth between teen jargon and adult pronouncements, game to talk about almost anything—she is not quite yet ready to think anything negative about her mother’s decision to put her entire family in front of the cameras to be picked apart and mocked as shallow and acquisitive. When I mention that the name Kardashian now stands for something—that it’s an adjective and not always a nice one—her eyes grow wide, like she’s hearing this for the first time. “Oh, my God. I toadully get what you’re saying,” she says. “People say a lot of what they think, and it’s not always positive. And we never say anything. We just take it. And then when people meet us, they’re pleasantly surprised. Because we aren’t what people think. One of the best lessons I ever learned from my sisters is not to take everything so seriously. Just leave it alone—it will pass in a week. That’s how I grew up. My sisters are so fucking strong, and they taught me and my little sister to just toughen up and not let it affect us. You know what’s real.”
Reality TV seems to cheapen everything it touches, including the viewers; it has made us more cynical, not less. Which only makes Kendall’s success in an industry built on luxury, exclusivity, and a bit of mystery that much more surprising. “I think being a Kardashian worked against her,” says Kim. “Coming from a reality show, people look down on that—a lot of people in the fashion industry don’t respect that world.” Even Kendall had serious doubts. “Two years ago, when I first started this, I thought: This is going to be so embarrassing. No one is going to accept me, and it’s going to be a complete failure.” Not exactly. But it did take a pop-culture maven like Marc Jacobs to jump-start Kendall’s career by casting her in his Fall 2014 show (and then in every show and two ad campaigns since), thereby giving the rest of the fashion world permission to think of her as cool. “We wanted to book her on her merit as a model,” says Jacobs, “not because she’s a Kardashian. Every bit of her success is a testament to her hard work and her passion.”
It is also a testament to one very wise decision she made early on. “Marc invited my whole family to that first show, and I was like, ‘I love you guys, but can you please just not come?’ I was trying so hard to be taken seriously, like, ‘Guys: This is not a joke or a stunt; this is what I want to do with my life.’ I had to prove that I could do it.” She sighs deeply, the sense of relief that it all worked out as palpable as if it just happened yesterday. “And now I feel like I’m a part of something. I feel I have accomplished something that is mine.”
Way to go, Kendall! Peep more of her gorgeous spread here.
A photo posted by Kendall Jenner (@kendalljenner) on
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