Kylie Jenner is the first Kardashian-Jenner to appear on the cover of British Vogue. She was surprised to learn that too – she thought Kendall had surely been on the cover before. British Vogue really plays up the “Kylie is the mysterious Garbo figure of Gen Z” angle, which falls apart pretty quickly. Still, I buy that Kylie is the one K-J who has been more reluctant to air out her personal life at the drop of a hat. When she reached 18 years old, it was like her storylines on KUWTK even got more vague – just stuff about her dogs and Kylie chiming in on her sisters’ many dramas. So, what do we learn about Kylie in this piece? She loves fashion, she works hard, she’s silly, she’s a Leo and she’s been spending more time in New York…probably because she’s dating Timothee Chalamet. Some highlights:
She has a NYC bolthole & most people don’t recognize her: “I’ve been walking the High Line.” It’s all about a baseball cap, she explains. “There’s an angle that you can do where they can’t see your face, and I wear a mask. I haven’t had one person notice me. I’ve been really able to get around.”
On fame: “People ask me, ‘How do you deal with all this?’ I don’t remember a time before. I don’t really remember a time before there were the lights and the cameras.”
Her teen years: “The world put a lot of pressure on a teenager, me, to make the right decisions. And I just have to be gentle with myself because although I carried so much responsibility in the moment, I was just trying to do what was best for me. I was just trying my best as a human. I have to realise: ‘It’s OK, Kylie.’ Looking back, I’m like, ‘God, I was 17, 18.’ I have this daughter and I just want the best for her and I want her to just love herself unconditionally. It’s taught me so much.”
The mom thing: “It’s like the whole mom thing, really. I was 19 when I got pregnant, 20 when I had her…. It was wild. Looking back at it, I give myself more empathy and grace. But when I was a teenager, even my family were like: ‘You aren’t that young.’ I think maybe I carried myself [a certain way] or I’d already been working for 10 years. It didn’t hit me [straight away]. But it was a huge life change.”
She suffered from prolonged postpartum depression after both of her children’s births. “Stormi’s lasted a year,” she says, Aire’s around the same length of time. “I’m going to be 27, and I’m finally feeling like myself again, and [looking back] I think, being pregnant, I wore sweatpants every day, I didn’t have time to figure out even some of the little things in my life, and then postpartum lasted a year. Mentally, it’s really hard. Hormonally, it’s really hard. I didn’t know how to dress. It hit me differently both times. Probably with my son it was major baby blues, so I was just so emotional over things that I probably wouldn’t be that emotional about [typically]. On the phone with my mom all day hysterically crying, saying, ‘I can’t figure out his name.’ Now my advice to all my friends having children is pick the name before, because when the hormones hit you can’t make decisions. You can’t. When I met him, he was just the most beautiful thing to me and I couldn’t believe just how perfect he was. I felt like such a failure that I couldn’t name him. He deserved so much more than that. It just really triggered me.”
It took her a year to settle on Aire. “My son’s name was actually Knight for a long time and my daughter, still to this day, is like, ‘Do you remember when Aire’s name was Knight?’ And I’m like,” here Jenner slips into the ultimate mum tone: “‘No.’ And she’s like, ‘That was so funny, Mom. I like Knight better.’ And I’m like: ‘You know what, we are not doing this again.’”
Her kids love her unconditionally: “No matter what I’m going through or what I look like or what the internet writes about me that day. I come home and my kids just love me unconditionally. They’re just obsessed with me and that’s taught me to walk through life a little easier. I’m like, ‘OK, well I have these little humans at home that need me and love me and think I’m the most perfect person in the world, so I don’t really need validation from outside sources.’”
How pregnancy changed her body: “I was 200 pounds when I gave birth to my 9 pound babies: 8.3 and 8.9. I finally lost all the baby weight after my daughter and then got pregnant with my son two months later….I feel like people didn’t give me, or give women in general, enough empathy. I see pictures [online] and people are accusing me of being on drugs or something…… I’m back at my weight I was before I had my daughter and son and people are putting side by sides of me three months postpartum. I’m like: ‘Does everyone forget that I had two children and I gained 60 pounds both pregnancies?’”
On Timothee Chalamet: “Privacy is so important to me in life,” she says – a response that might cause a fair deal of head scratching for some. Yet does it also make perfect sense? Perhaps, I ask, you haven’t been blessed with a great deal of privacy in your life sometimes? She nods, ever thoughtful. “Yeah.” Then she smiles. “It feels so good.”
Something I find consistently interesting about Kylie is that she never blames her mom for getting the family involved in all of this and changing the course of all of their lives. Kylie was only 9 years old when all of this started happening! She’s been “famous” for 16 years and she’s only 27. Like… you would think that Kylie would have mixed feelings about Kris, but no. She always describes Kris as her best friend and she plans to have a similar “best friend” relationship with her own daughter. As for Kylie’s postpartum depression… she’s spoken about it before I feel bad for her, and I feel bad that there weren’t people in her life who offered her more support and help. Where was Kris, you know? The stuff about her kids loving her unconditionally… it’s a lot to unpack. I understand what she’s saying, but yeah… there’s just a lot to unpack.
Cover & IG courtesy of British Vogue. Additional photos courtesy of Cover Images.
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- Celebrities attend the 2024 Met Gala Celebrating ‘Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion’ at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City Featuring: Kylie Jenner Where: New York, United States When: 06 May 2024 Credit: Michael Stewart/INSTARimages.com
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- Celebrities attend the 2024 Met Gala Celebrating ‘Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion’ at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City Featuring: Kylie Jenner Where: New York, United States When: 06 May 2024 Credit: Michael Stewart/INSTARimages.com
“don’t really remember a time before there were the lights and the cameras.”
This is so depressing…
I wonder how she would adapt if suddenly she had a “normal” camera free life. It’s her reality at this point. Almost like Paris Hilton not knowing life without money. Kris built for her family lots of wealth and made them famous, but was the price too high? It’s one thing to never have to worry about money but to constantly be in the public eye is just a bit much.
Right? It really drives home how exploitative and heartbreaking it is that her family did this to her. It makes me feel for every childhood reality star and child star who could say that exact same thing. All kids deserve to have a childhood. Ugh.
It’s not just Kris I blame, her sisters have a lot to answer for. I doubt she would have had all the plastic surgery she’s had (so far) if not for Kim, Kourtney and Khloe and what they’ve done to themselves. Maybe Kylie would have been happy with her original face and butt. It’s sad.
Her kids will love her unconditionally, but they aren’t pets or props. At some point, they will have their own lives. She doesn’t seem prepared for that.
I’m not sure you could ever have a normal, well-adjusted understanding of what love is and how healthy family dynamics are supposed to feel, sadly. I hope she’s in so, so, sooo much therapy.
Se was so young when she had Stormi. And remember Kris has been pressuring Kendall to get pregnant for years?
I’m not sure her sisters had that much influence. She was growing up in LA and her parents are/were both obsessed with looks.
Regarding postpartum and support, I don’t think those things prevent ppd and having a year to possibly be on meds for depression and then off is actually a very good timeframe. For many it is so much longer.
I think if her life does not end up a horrific tragedy- everything about her is a success.
And by that i just mean- being in the spotlight that young, on social media, with a money first kind of mom-ager- it could go terribly wrong for her in a number of ways.
I’m over 50, i am not Kylie’s target audience. But she has seemingly held up under scrutiny that could crush her.
I’m rooting for her mental health.
Though seeing babies as – how much they love you (as opposed to your love for them)- seems like a red flag- but perhaps she only meant it as a salve in the context of the media/social media glare were people say really ugly things to and about her. And that is certainly a fair point.
What I have experienced and what i took her to mean is just that we can be so very hard on ourselves but when we experience the deep love and acceptance our babies and young children have for us it provides a deep healing and touch point where we can say I am enough, I’m everything to these babies and they don’t see or care about the imperfections we may mistakenly focus on. It’s a perspective shift many of us need in young adulthood.
Are her kids, and to be honest, all the Kardashian/Jenner kids, in the same boat? I always wonder if any of these kids will have a choice, but then again they don’t know any different. Their lives are in the spotlight. Who are the role models for a good relationship?
At this point Kylie is choosing to be in the spotlight. Sure when she was 15 it felt like the family industry and she HAD to be in it. But now she’s incredibly rich and can make her own choices. If she wanted to pull the plug on it all and go full Garbo, she could do that today.
She can also choose whether to pressure her kids to go into the industry like her mom did to her…or not. It’s up to her.
The comments about her throughout her teen years were gross and misogynistic. Reactions to her pregnancy were particularly pathetic, calling her trash for being pregnant at 19. Girls and women aren’t trash no matter what age they become pregnant or sexually active, but I thought it was ridiculous how some people tried to act l9 wasn’t a normal age to be having sex just because a young woman from a family they didn’t like was pregnant.
I side-eye the privacy stuff so hard. She and her sisters were obviously all pushed into fame by their mother but every single one of them now has the money and the means to just not do this anymore. Kylie doesn’t have to be on the cover of Vogue. None of them have to date movie stars and sports stars. Those are their choices now. Like how much do we ever hear about the Olsen twins? They run their business and mostly stay actually private.
This made me so sad. These women are all so vapid but the younger one never stood a chance.
About the post-partum- of course Kris was there for Kylie. But when you’re depressed, there is only so much someone else can do. People can still be there helping and you can still be depressed. Hormones don’t recognize that!
I’m glad she’s on the other side.
Every time I see her I’m shocked all over again by how much older she looks than she actually is. I mean, she’s beautiful in those photos, but she looks 47 not 27. I wonder if this will do anything to stop younger folks from getting so much work done at such an early age.