The career of Karlie Kloss, 26-year-old catwalk queen from St Louis, Missouri, 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.
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“I am deeply ambitious and driven, and there are a lot of big things I want to do – big things,” Kloss tells Elaine Welteroth. “But I also want to enjoy the people I love and who love me. It’s important that I have joy in my life.” Her recent marriage to 34-year-old venture capitalist Josh Kushner weighs heavily in her life’s joy category – as well as the pillars of the Jewish faith, which she converted to for Kushner. “Changing part of who you are for someone else can be seen as weak,” she begins. “But you know what? Actually, if you’ve been through what I’ve experienced, it requires you to be anything but weak. It requires me to be stronger and self-loving and resilient. I really did not take this lightly.”
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“It wasn’t enough to just love Josh and make this decision for him,” she continues. “This is my life and I am an independent, strong woman. It was only after many years of studying and talking with my family and friends and soul searching that I made the decision to fully embrace Judaism in my life and start planning for a future with the man I chose to marry.”
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Shabbat, the day of rest that requires completely disconnecting from the digital world from sunset each Friday until nightfall on Saturday, has been a ritual Kloss has specifically embraced. “I think we all have a tendency to just keep going,” she shares. “Some people find grounding through meditation. Some find it through exercise. And to each their own, but for me, Shabbat has brought so much meaning into my life. It helps me reconnect to the actual world.”
Kloss’s studious approach to embracing Judaism reflects her insatiable curiousity. In 2015, long before the current wave of feminist hashtagivism, she enrolled in New York University’s Gallatin School to study feminist theory. During this soul-searching period, she quit one of her most lucrative contracts, with the lingerie conglomerate Victoria’s Secret. “The reason I decided to stop working with Victoria’s Secret was I didn’t feel it was an image that was truly reflective of who I am and the kind of message I want to send to young women around the world about what it means to be beautiful,” says Kloss. “I think that was a pivotal moment in me stepping into my power as a feminist, being able to make my own choices and my own narrative, whether through the companies I choose to work with, or through the image I put out to the world.”
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The couple’s union has become tabloid fodder, put under further scrutiny by Kloss’s own political views. While Kloss and her husband are fervent Democrats, Kushner’s brother Jared is a senior presidential advisor who happens to be married to Ivanka Trump. “It’s been hard,” she explains. “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.” 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.
The lesson she wants to share with other women? “Looking back at my late teens and early twenties, I think I was fearful that I would lose a job or lose my position if I said I didn’t want to do something,” notes Kloss. “But I did not lose out on jobs. If anything, the more I exercised the power of my voice, the more I earned respect from my peers. And I earned more respect for myself. Only now do I have the confidence to stand tall – all 6ft 2in of me – and know the power of my voice.”
Read the full interview in the August issue of Vogue, which is out on newsstands on July 5.
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