Kendall Jenner Really Wants You to Take Her Career Seriously, OK?
Kendall Jenner has always know what she’s wanted and hasn’t been afraid to say so (even if her quotes get a bit repetitive — she just really means it). As a kid on Keeping Up With the Kardashians, she idolized her sisters in the way siblings do, but had different ambitions than to dominate the reality show world. Instead, supermodels were her Hillary Clinton. And if Jenner’s name were on the ballot in 2016, I’m not even sure the politician would win out over the pretty face (seriously, the state of the world today is very weird). With drive, determination, some luck, and already existing notoriety, the 19-year-old has conquered high-fashion with one runway show, campaign, endorsement deal after another. In yet another gig to add to her portfolio, Jenner covers Harper’s Bazaar for the magazine’s May subscriber issue wearing a floral embroidered dress from Chanel’s most recent couture collection.
Shot by Karl Lagerfeld in an storage space wearing Haute Couture gowns from Giorgio Armani, Valentino, Givenchy, and more, this is the stuff that Jenner’s dreams are literally made of. “I started this hoping that it would have longevity,” she said. “I didn’t come into this thinking it’s going to be a fun thing that I’m going to do on the side. It’s something I want to do my whole life. It’s a career, so I needed to be really gentle with it. We had to pick and choose things very specifically.”
But this staunch steadfastness stated in regards to her modeling isn’t just a one-off quote. For the past few years, Jenner’s been like a broken record standing on a soapbox attempting to convince everyone how serious she is. And it’s kind of worked. Here, everything she’s said to convince the crowd she’s so much more than her famous last name.
On breaking away from her sister’s shadow: “I love Kim,“ she told Allure in February. "But for a minute I wanted it to be like, ‘OK, this is [Kendall’s] thing—she’s taking it seriously.’”
In WSJ Magazine, which picked her as a “luminary” alongside Tim Howard, dishing her thoughts on youth: “I feel like I grew up too fast a long time ago. Having older siblings, you grow up around adults, so you mature more quickly. I saw my sisters and parents working every day, so I was pretty much brought up to be a workaholic. But I just turned 19 a couple weeks ago, and I’m scared to be 20—it’s the first step out of being a teenager. My sister Khloé always says to me and my younger sister, Kylie: You have your whole life to be an adult but only so long to be a kid. And we get it. In the right situations, I try to be as immature as I can sometimes—react to things as if I were 12. You can’t take things too seriously. I just laugh thinking about my dad being a teenager, partying. It’s the funniest thing. And it makes me think—what am I going to be like when I’m 65?”
It’s not all in the name: “People think that this [success] just came to me. But it didn’t. What I have has almost worked against me,” Jenner said in LOVE magazine. “I had to work even harder to get where I wanted because people didn’t take me seriously as a model. Because of the TV show.”
On her ambitions growing up: “To be honest, this is exactly what I wanted to be,” she told Interview in her first topless shoot. “I was always looking up to supermodels. They were, like, my superheroes.” She added, “My parents brought up Kylie and me to be workaholics. That’s something I really appreciate.”
On not judging the model by her reality show: “People didn’t want to take a chance on me, I think because I was sort of known. They were a little bit on the fence about it. Some people might think that what I’ve done before made it easier for me to get jobs, but it was actually a disadvantage. I had to work even harder,” she said in Teen Vogue. "I felt like I should pick specific designers that I wanted to go for so I could make a good first impression—or more like a fifth impression…But it’s my first impression on this world.“
It’s her job, OK? “Modeling isn’t something I’m doing purely for fun. It’s not something I’m doing to prove people wrong. It’s something that I’m doing because it’s what I want to do. And I enjoy it,” she admitted to Dazed & Confused. “You can’t take anything personally in this business. Follow your dreams, but there is a lot of criticism. You have to brush it off. Everybody is looking for something different.”
She ran around to go-sees just like other models: "In reality I worked pretty hard for this, running around doing tests. It wasn’t like I just got it magically and it has just happened,” she said in a televised interview with Nightline. “I would always be looking at these supermodels, they were just so amazing to me, they were like superheroes… I want to be some little girl’s superhero. I want to be the best role model I can be to a little girl or a little boy or to anybody.”
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