The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Kendall Jenner,
As she moves from the catwalk to behind the camera to photograph her first high-fashion story, for LOVE magazine, Paul Flynn catches up with face of the moment Kendall Jenner
model of the moment (and sister of Kim Kardashian), is now stepping behind the camera. Paul Flynn joins her first big shoot
‘I want to be taken seriously. 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. Because of the Kardashian name’
Two weeks after her 21st birthday par ty in Los Angeles (at which t he super model was given a £200,000 Rolls-Royce by her family), Kendall Jenner made a sleepy, two-hour, 5am trip to a spot in Palmdale in the California desert. Kendall was wearing a black MA1 jacket, skinny jeans, hair scrunched at the back of her head and a light meter around her neck. She dozed through most of the journey, having stayed up late the night before looking for inspiration online for a surprising, early and potentially life-changing new career.
Kendall made her high-fashion debut on the Marc Jacobs catwalk, autumn/winter 2014, a first casting given the red-hot seal of approval by Katie Grand, Jacobs’s creative director. For the corresponding issue of Grand’s LOVE magazine, the door-stopping Condé Nast biannual that earlier brokered Cara Delevingne’s rise to generation-defining fashion fame, Kendall was photographed for her first cover story. Twoand-a-half years later, Kendall was about to step from in front of the lens and take her place behind it. After shooting an inside story with Kaia Gerber, Cindy Crawford’s doppelgänger 15-year-old daughter, for the previous issue of
LOVE, Kendall would now shoot the cover story. Assembled in a diner in the bloodshot Palmdale winter sunshine, eating breakfast at 7am were a bunch of unknowns. These were aspiring faces who had won a Willy Wonka-style golden ticket via social media to find a new cover star.
New photographer, new subjects: what could possibly go right? ‘Exactly,’ says Kendall, one January afternoon at home in LA. ‘I was a little ner vous about it but when Kat ie asked, I thought, why not? In the last two years I’ve been around so many people who have opened so much up for me. I’m not going to get nervous and pussy out now.’ Aware that most of the models for her two-day fashion story were novices, Kendall made light work of introductions, high-fiving her assembled cast.
No contemporary star has had a closer relationship with the camera than Kendall. She first met the paparazzi before she was even born. In t he early 1990s, her mother, t he Kardashian family ‘momager’ Kris Jenner – then five months preg nant with Kendall – waded through a media scrum to attend the trial of OJ Simpson for the murder of his wife (and Kris’s close friend) Nicole Brown Simpson. Kris’s former husband, Rob Kardashian, was running the sports star’s defence.
When she was 11 years old, Kendall’s family’s reality show Keeping Up With the Kardashians debuted and within six months, Mom was explaining what periods are to little Kendall on TV. The Kardashians’ candour, confession and contouring connected with a late-noughties mood of prestige and acquisition. Jackie Collins once described them to me as ‘the same as all of us, but with better place settings’.
During the opening bars of her high-fashion life I interviewed Kendall at her agency, The Society, in New York and she explained her decision to try to take her place in a more rarefied world. ‘I want to be taken seriously,’ she said. ‘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. Because of the Kardashian name.’
In the interim, Kendall has earned her stripes over and over, scoring campaigns for Calvin Klein, Fendi, the lingerie giant La Perla. She is a cat walk fi x ture and cur rent ly under an exclusive contract with Estée Lauder. For the
LOVE shoot she was given the first loan of the Burberry February 2017 collection, under the direct instruction of the label’s chief creative and chief executive officer, Christopher Bailey. There is nothing left to prove, perhaps explaining her decision to get behind the camera in the desert. ‘I’ve become a different person,’ she says. ‘I have a lot more confidence that comes from the job. Those years from 18 to 21 are the growth years where you really start to find yourself. I did a lot of that while I was travelling the world, while I was working.’
As her school friends drifted away to college, Kendall schooled herself in her chosen industry in the company of its major players. ‘I was living in LA and working on the TV show and doing little modelling jobs here and there, but nothing crazy. I was kind of very reserved here in LA. I had never even been to Europe before I started working. I’d been surrounded by this, whatever you want to call it, this fame thing already so it wasn’t that. But I only had my friends from high school who I still have and I
still love but I never really had anyone who could relate to what I wanted to do.’
Kendall says some of the groundwork for her current life had been laid by her sister Kim. ‘She and Kanye had come into that [highfashion] world and started breaking it a little bit but I came in not too long after,’ she says. ‘I think that people weren’t expecting us to be taken this seriously. It was almost like a “screw you” to everyone that thought we couldn’t do it.’ Having Kim’s ear has helped as her career progressed to the upper tier. ‘It’s really cool to have her involved with it too. She knows what I’m talking about. When I come to her and say, “Oh my God, I got this photo shoot with this photog rapher in this magazine,” she knows what I’m saying. I can celebrate with her on a level that maybe I can’t celebrate with one of my other sisters because they don’t get it as much.’
In the desert, Kendall arrived without a bodyguard. ‘It was important for me to stop the models feeling intimidated,’ she says. ‘Because they’d been brought to LA, to work with one of the most amazing creative directors in the world and one of the most amazing stylists and, you know, probably working with me was weird or a little freaky, too. You don’t want them to believe all the things they hear about the industry.’ Her decision wasn’t just about the subjects. ‘I don’t like feeling abnormal. If I can do anything within my power to try and feel the least abnormal and still be safe, then I’m cool.’
The decision to eschew security felt all the more surprising given the break-in at Kim’s Paris lodgings last year. ‘We’ve had to beef it up, and I definitely have security where it’s necessary. But I’m in the middle of the desert and I’m leaving my house at 5am and so I don’t think that needs security.’
In the event, the two-day shoot went without a hiccup, at least for the new cover photographer. There was one minor injury when the compelling transgender model Hari Nef, one of a select band of known faces who responded to the casting call, cut her knee rolling through an industrial waste land at Kendall’s instruction, the dripping blood just missing her beautiful Burberry slip dress. The only other mishap involved the prime minister of Belize’s wife having to smoothe out a visa problem for a new face called Joyjah, who had trouble getting into the US. ‘I’m glad that everyone didn’t think that I was being a diva or anything. What was super-weird for me was that the production crew that we’d hired was the same crew I’ve worked with on different shoots. I work with them all the time on Estée Lauder projects. Usually they’re the ones saying, “All right Kendall, come to set, it’s time to go.” This time they were coming to me and asking me, “OK, when do you need this person?”’
Amid the 20-plus-strong casting, Kendall made inimitable, professional work of shooting a Goth schoolgirl from Cleckheaton, Yorkshire, a 15-year-old from Arizona who’d cried herself to sleep on the night of Donald Trump’s election, a sprightly videographer from upstate New York who had previously been living in her car, an English expat student from Barcelona, one Olympic champion, one male ballerina and a stray fashion intern from Paris with multicoloured hair. ‘They all killed it,’ she says. Some famous faces wandered in and out of the two desert days, which at times felt like a superglamorous school trip. Kaia Gerber noted casually that her mother had shot her era-defining Pepsi commercial at the same spot. When the majestic Game of Thrones star Gwen do line Christie arrived to be shot on the second day as the sun set, prosecco was dispensed in the knowledge that Kendall had made her photographic transition with ease.
‘Times like this remind you why you got into magazines in the first place,’ says Katie Grand. Delighted with Kendall’s work, she said that in her daily life, surrounded by household-name photographers, it can be t he least experienced who surprise most. ‘I was there to be her editor, bodyguard and creative director. In the end, I didn’t need to be any of those things .’‘ Oh my God ,’ says Kendall. ‘That is so cute.’
For the second-youngest member of a family so closely documented and scrutinised on film, it’s tempting to read Kendall’s decision to step behind the camera as a psychological desire to control the drama in her life rather than being at the centre of it. ‘They’re always there, it’s true,’ she says of cameras. ‘But drama doesn’t always happen because you’re in the picture. You can make the drama by taking the photo. If I’m in a picture where I’m, say, in a restaurant and some fan catches a photo of me making out with someone? The drama isn’t started because I made out with someone. The drama is started because that person took the photo of it. Then they put it on social media.’
She says taking the LOVE commission was not about insuring her future against a time she may tire of modelling. ‘No. I have multiple folders in my computer and in my phone of all the photos that I’ve taken throughout my life, of my friends, of everything I’ve done. I’ve always genuinely enjoyed [photography]. And I still do things that I’d rather keep personal. I think it’s more about showing my eye.’
At the time of speaking, Kendall has yet to show anyone the handiwork of her time in the desert. ‘My parents? No. No one, actually. I’m very weird. I want people to see it once it’s in the magazine and it’s done. I very rarely show someone even a photo of myself before it comes out. I like you to see it all put together, how the photographer wanted you to see it.’