courtyard. Instead of being dazzled by the glitter
of her morning, it’s not until she spots two
little girls dressed in matching Bretons that
she suddenly gasps. “There’s something about
a cute little Parisian family!” she exclaims.
“I love going to Parc Monceau – there’s a
merry-go-round and carousel, and a school
right by it, so I go and sit there while all the
kids are running around and get ice cream.”
The normality of it is captivating to her, and
it strikes me that she is closer to their age than
my own. “I’m an old soul,” she shrugs.
S
he came out like that,” quips her mother
- but there’s no two ways about it, Kaia’s
unique childhood certainly helped.
A second-generation supermodel –
how rare is that? – she grew up both immersed
in and removed from the world of high
fashion. Her early years were spent in relative
conventionality on Malibu’s Zuma Beach, with
her older brother, Presley, gaining an education
in BB guns and ATVs. But: “You’d walk into
my house and there was a Herb Ritts picture
of my mom’s boob, like, right there,” she grins.
Such paraphernalia proved magnetic: soon,
instead of flicking through Dr Seuss, she’d head
for the Avedon photo books on the coffee table
and pore over their pages. Whenever she chose
to change out of the shorts that she’d steal from
her brother (“I never really got mad... only
when it was the good stuff,” he laughs), she
had her mother’s archive of Alaïa and Galliano
to contend with. When she brought friends
home, her mother would take them into her
wardrobe, do their hair and make-up, and stage
impromptu photo shoots. “Of course, they’d
go for the highest heels that they could barely
teeter in,” Crawford laughs. “And stretchy
dresses, like Dolce & Gabbana, because they
wouldn’t be so big on them.”
It was a step up from most children’s dressing-
up boxes. Kaia was 10 when she took part in her
first proper photo shoot – a Versace Kids
campaign captured by Mert & Marcus. “As much
as it was just fun, I do think when she started
modelling, that experience of being in front of
the camera wasn’t as foreign as it would be to
someone who didn’t have me for a mom,” reflects
Crawford. Meanwhile, at home, Kaia was
surrounded by the West Coast glitterati; George
Clooney, business partner of her father, nightlife
magnate Rande Gerber, was a regular house
guest. “I had no idea who he was,” she laughs,
“but I do remember being five years old and
being charmed by him.” Naomi Campbell would
come for New Year’s Eve and stage spiritual
rituals for the family. To Kaia, it was all normal.
“To me, she was Mom – not Cindy Crawford.”
Kaia appears to have emerged from all this
resolutely unconceited – but the relentless drive
that has marked out her parents’ careers (Cindy
is renowned for transforming her modelling
fame into everything from TV presenting to
the launch of her own production company;
Rande for turning his and Clooney’s tequila
brand into a billion-dollar business) certainly
appears inherited. “I’ve grown up watching
Mom turn something that wasn’t necessarily
viewed as a business into what she’s turned it
into,” explains Kaia. “The same goes for my
father, watching him turn something he loves
into a business... it’s really inspiring having
parents who lead by example.”
No doubt their staunch resolve, plus the
starriness of their dinner parties, has equipped
her with the confidence to navigate any room.
A self-confessed bookish teenager, she found
it “more intimidating to walk into school and
be around people my own age” than to be on
set with Steven Meisel at 13. She still doesn’t
get nervous before a shoot, she says: “I mean,
I’m just standing there – how bad can I do?”
Instead of rehearsing before walking her first
runway, for Raf Simons’s Calvin Klein in 2017,
when she blew the industry away with her
astonishingly assured strut, she watched a
YouTube compilation of models falling down,
“just to see what the worst that could happen
was. I was like, yeah, these are bad,” she says,
laughing, “but they’re all fine in the end.”
It’s this matter-of-fact approach that best
defines Kaia. It’s an attitude she thanks her
family for, rather than any leg-up they may have
given her. She has little patience for people who
think the latter. “You know, you can’t just call
and get your child in a show,” she remarks when
I ask about insider privilege. “My mom has the
funniest response to it. She says, ‘If I could call
and get Kaia into a Chanel show, well, I would
get myself into a Chanel show.’” “Even though
it probably bothers her, we all realise that, yeah,
Steven Meisel will see her [because of who she
is],” says Crawford. “But you and I both know
that Meisel, or Chanel, or Vogue – well, they
might have her for an audition, but they’re not
booking her because she’s my daughter...
I mean, she’s doing things I never did.”
Kaia belongs to a new generation of models
who are fully aware that fame can be fleeting:
in an era of Instagram starlets and social-media
commentary, she and her peers – from the
Hadids to the Kardashians – know the potential
pitfalls of the digital age. She has experienced
the sort of criticism that women of any age
would struggle to handle; her developing body
has been subject to painful scrutiny by her 4.5
million Instagram followers. “Being a teenage
girl is hard enough,” she sighs. “Everyone has
opinions about themselves, but hearing everyone
else’s is hard.” When she was repeatedly criticised
for appearing underweight at 15, “I was like,
‘Just look at a high school and you’ll see all
these scrawny people around.’ Having people
comment on a temporary state of my body was
not the best feeling, it didn’t help my self-
confidence. It being documented was tough. But
I also knew who I was, that I was healthy.
Clockwise from
above: Kaia
photographed by
Steven Meisel,
Vogue, March 2018;
backstage with
Virgil Abloh at
Off-White a/w ’19;
in Paris earlier
this year
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