THE TROPHY GOWN OF
NOW COMES WITH ADDED
VOLUME: TAKE A DUVET
DAY IN PIERPAOLO
PICCIOLI’S DOWN-FILLED
DRESS FOR MONCLER.
QUILTED SHAWL, JACKET
AND SKIRT, ALL TO
ORDER, 1 MONCLER
PIERPAOLO PICCIOLIIt’s so easy to go, go, go and not know why or
where you’re going,” says Karlie Kloss. It is
5.01am in an airport lounge in New York City,
the Monday after a rare, weekend-long vacation- spent on a yacht in the Caribbean with her new
husband and some friends – and the 6ft 2in model
is in reflective mood. “Sometimes it’s like, what are
we all doing it for, you know?” Her bare skin glows
preternaturally under the unforgiving fluorescent
lighting, and a pensive expression spreads across her
face as she leans in to ask her assistant, “Do you feel
like 30 is a thing for you, too?” Nicolette – also in
the second half of her twenties – nods: “Uh, yeah!”
For a few moments, the two wax poetic about
entering their “Saturn return”, a buzz term among
millennials that I loosely understand to be the
astrological equivalent of a quarter-life crisis, or
turning point. It is a curiously existential conversation
for such an ungodly hour, but perhaps appropriate
given Kloss’s life over the past few years. The career
of the 26-year-old catwalk queen from St Louis,
Missouri, one of the world’s highest-earning models,
has been a masterclass in modern diversification:
major contracts and endorsement deals; a much-
lauded and smart-minded philanthropic project,
Kode With Klossy, which trains young women across
America in tech; and a blossoming television career
as the newly arrived host of Project Runway (full
disclosure, I am also a judge on the show, and have
known Karlie for a few years). Then, of course, there’s
her recent marriage to 34-year-old venture capitalist
Josh Kushner, who, judging by the way she lights
up when he FaceTimes her, weighs heavily in her
life’s joy category.
“We literally held hands the entire night,” Karlie
recalls of their intimate wedding last October in
the woods of upstate New York, where the couple
share a cabin. Maria Grazia Chiuri designed the
beautiful Dior couture gown for their nuptials. It
was a romantic wedding fit for an American princess,
though her prince’s family ties to the White House - Kushner’s brother Jared is a senior presidential
advisor who happens to be married to Ivanka Trump - have admittedly complicated her fairy tale.
Naturally, it’s a union that has become tabloid
fodder, put under further scrutiny by Kloss’s own
political views. A fervent Democrat, as is her husband,
Kloss has rallied for gun reform alongside teenage
survivors of Parkland at last year’s March For Our
Lives, and been an advocate for Planned Parenthood
on Instagram. Yet what detractors tend to forget is
that she and Josh fell in love more than seven years
ago (Kloss was 19), long before anyone had fathomed
that a Trump presidency could become reality.
I find myself wondering how Kloss’s activism goes
down at the dinner table with her in-laws; it can’t
be an easy line to toe. “It’s been hard,” she says
frankly. “But I choose to focus on the values that I
share with my husband, and those are the same
liberal values that I was raised with and that have
guided me throughout my life.” >
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