South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Jenner ‘stripping down’ as personal style evolves
Youngest sister in Kardashian clan has slew of products to go with her new look
Kylie Jenner is 26 years old. She is a mother of two small children. She no longer wears wigs or bold makeup every day. She no longer wakes up and immediately posts on social media. “Maturity” and “sophistication” are the words guiding her branding now.
She is “stripping down a little bit,” as Jenner said at her Calabasas, California, office recently. “I don’t have this thick mane down to my butt, I don’t have lash extensions, I don’t have these long claws.”
She held up nails like glossy red almonds. To her, those traits were markers of her youth; to others, they signaled cultural appropriation of Black women.
Perhaps you’ve noticed this evolution. Perhaps you perform weariness at any mention of the Kardashian-Jenner family. But you’re still reading this, and no one is more aware of that phenomenon — one eye watching her, the other rolling — than the family’s youngest, most enigmatic and arguably most famous sister. Jenner has 400 million followers on Instagram. That number, which exceeds the population of the United States, surpasses each of her siblings’ followings.
Since she was a child, Jenner’s public persona has been defined by consumption. She consumes the trappings of celebrity and wealth: clothes and cars, private jets and cosmetic procedures. Then we consume her: the media she shares, the celebrity gossip she generates and, critically to the family business, the products she sells.
She recently announced Sprinter, a line of canned vodka soda, and released Cosmic, her first fragrance under Kylie Cosmetics, a company that she co-founded at age 18 and was valued at $1.2 billion in 2019. She is also continuing to release clothing through her new brand Khy, offering “high fashion pieces for less,” she said.
Even by Kar-Jenner business standards — each sister is attached to at least one commodity, including tequila, gummy supplements, size-inclusive denim and, the crown jewel, shapewear — this has been an eventful time for Jenner.
But if she’s tired, she doesn’t show it. If she feels any pressure, she doesn’t show it. Jenner doesn’t show much these days. In 2020, she told a beauty YouTuber that being criticized when she showed her “true personality” hurt more than being criticized when she was “playing a character, not showing people everything.”
This is how she has learned to live publicly as an adult: by being watchful, reserved, soft-spoken.
“When you share so much, you open yourself up to more comments and more people’s opinions of your life,” she said in her office, her face inscrutable.
That face. The one people have been studying and debating since she was 16 and began enlarging her lips. Initially, Jenner claimed that she had been using makeup and not injections to enhance them, and she soon began selling the Kylie Lip Kit to help others do the same. A decade later, people are still commenting and opining. Has the face of any other woman of her generation been more seen or scrutinized?
“It’s just years and years of not feeling like my face or looks are accepted,” Jenner said. “There’s nothing anyone could ever say now that would hurt me.”
Fragrances are often personal. Jenner wanted hers to appeal to the masses.
“I just want everyone to like it,” she said of Cosmic, which is mostly sweet, battered with vanilla musk and star jasmine. She wanted the bottle to look as if it had fallen from space into her hand, then molded around her fingers.
Jenner solicited feedback. She and a friend doused themselves in the scent before going to a party, she said, then compared compliments at the end of the night.
Similarly, Jenner said she hosted “rounds and rounds and rounds” of taste tests with family and friends for Sprinter, her new fruit flavored vodka soda.
Generally, the inner workings of celebrity fronted brands are opaque, and their true leadership not always clear, thanks to layers of nondisclosure agreements.
The Kar-Jenner family, led by matriarch-manager Kris, has long emphasized their close involvement in their businesses, particularly when it comes to concepts and creative direction.
“Some people will say, ‘That’s a great idea, let me slap my name on that,’ ” Kris Jenner said. Kylie Jenner “wants to be in control of her decisions.”
In October, Kylie Jenner announced her clothing brand Khy, founded with Kris as well as Emma and Jens Grede, the entrepreneurial couple who partnered with Kim Kardashian on Skims and Khloe Kardashian on Good American. Jenner said she was involved in each “drop” from its inception: choosing collaborators, assembling mood boards, selecting fabrics and colors, directing photo shoots.
She also posts directly to Khy’s social accounts.
Khy has released four drops so far. The first was heavy on faux leather clothing, all priced under $200. (Sales reached $1 million within an hour, according to the company.) The fourth, released Feb. 28, was sheer and sexy: light and tight pieces in neutral colors with asymmetrical sleeves, twisted straps and cutouts, all priced under $100. Several styles appeared to sell out within minutes.
Jenner said her personal style began shifting about a year ago. She had ramped up appearances at Paris Fashion Week.
Some of Jenner’s followers were surprised when she shared a photo of herself wearing a puffsleeve “cottagecore” maxidress on vacation last summer. It was far from the popular “King Kylie” identity she inhabited in the mid-2010s, then an experimental Tumblr teen whose moody contra-Kardashian style made her more relatable. Commenters speculated that her new “clean girl” style was a result of her new relationship with Timothée Chalamet.
Given Jenner’s deluge of new products — and the products her sisters will surely release into the world this year — I asked her mother whether the family might reach a point when enough is enough, in terms of brand deals and empire building.
“My personal thought on working and career is that it really does keep you young,” she said. “There’s no limit on what we can do.”
Eight years ago, Kylie Jenner told Interview magazine that by age 30, she wanted to live off the grid on a farm in Malibu, raising chickens. She has since acquired chickens — and a garden maintained by “some nice ladies” that supplies her kitchens with the “blessing” of fruits and vegetables, including the kumquat sliced into my sparkling water.
In the spirit of her mother, Jenner has since changed her mind: “I have lots more years in me,” she said.