VOGUE – “I remember downloading Instagram,” Kendall Jenner recalls. “I couldn’t tell you how long ago it was, but I was at Disneyland with my family. I was on Twitter or something and my brother was like, ‘Have you heard of Instagram?’ And I said, ‘No.’ And he was like, ‘Get Instagram; it’s cool.’ ”
One hundred and thirty-five weeks, 1,842 posts, and over 8.6 million followers later, the 18-year-old sister of Kim, Khloé, and Kourtney is on the verge of It girl–dom in a way that her more famous sisters blew right past in their prolifically documented and methodically unorthodox quest for world domination. And having walked in Marc Jacobs’s fall 2014 show last night in a gossamer topped Look 18—foreshadowed by a week-old gram of @kendalljenner with her arm wrapped around Jacobs’s go-to stylist, Katie Grand (@kegrand)—she is having a moment that might spell the kind of modeling career that none of her sisters ever had the opportunity, or perhaps the interest, to pursue.
If the Marc Jacobs anointment sticks, could we be looking at the next Juergen Teller subject? A selfie-taking Sofia Coppola? The Cara to Kourtney’s Poppy? A Calabasas-raised Alexa Chung? Or was Jenner just a publicity stunt for the New York designer’s eponymous label, which has been watched closely since he left Louis Vuitton last year? And if so, does it even matter? She walked the Marc Jacobs show.“This is so freaky. My mom is going to freak out!” Kendall says, standing over six feet tall in heels and a full-skirted, bubblegum pink creation that appeared in Oscar de la Renta’s show just three days earlier. She fires up her iPhone, swipes open the camera, and flips its focus to face herself in the retina display. “I’m going to do her face and everything,” she determines as she begins to take ever more selfies.
Kendall takes 25 pictures in the span of two minutes and eight seconds before settling on one to send the elder Jenner, whom she really does eerily resemble at the moment. Perhaps later she will edit one or two in Picfx, but for now she decides, “I think I’ve taken enough.”
