Leaning back in her chair, Karlie Kloss is looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows across the Sydney cityscape. “You know, maybe the next time you speak to me, somewhere like this will be my office,” she says with an impish smile, waving her hands around the space with a flourish. “I’ll be the CEO, with a big boardroom, the corner office.” Even though she is laughing while she is saying this, I am certain she is completely serious.
Everything about Kloss visually clocks in as supermodel, a self-evidence that would not pass anyone by. Exhibit A: here photographed for Vogue Australia on Bondi Beach. All long limbs and the subtlest angles, delicate features arranged perfectly so, letting her flit from gamine to sophisticate with the raise of an eyebrow, a wrist angled here or there.
She is the girl plucked from St Louis, Minnesota, to walk exclusively for Calvin Klein, propelling her to the upper echelons of the fashion world. Bearing all the hallmarks of a classic successful model, she has walked for every major fashion show and appeared in countless campaigns and magazine covers. This is her third for Vogue Australia, and 36th internationally.
“I’ve been modelling for a decade,” she’ll say as a fallback, as though she is a little bashful about having worked so long given that she is only 24 years old. “I feel so mature being able to say that I’ve been modelling for 10 years!”
However triumphant her modelling career has been, it is underselling Kloss herself to allow it to be the main focus. Off set, she returns to being the Karlie Kloss the world knows as a coder, baker, entrepreneur, philanthropist and student at New York University. Model-turnedmogul isn’t the most far-fetched of career transitions, one marked along the way with neon signs bearing names such as Elle Macpherson and Tyra Banks. But Kloss’s brand extensions into computer programming and baking are more left-of-field (not a make-up line or exaltation of beauty in sight). And essentially, it is all the more sincere. “I don’t want to be complacent, and I don’t want to just be one thing,” says Kloss of her curiosity and unwillingness to accept a single label.
Written by Zara Wong.
Styled by Christine Centenera.
Photographed by Benny Horne.
Manicure by Jocelyn Petroni.
Read the full cover story in Vogue Australia, April 2017.