Barefoot and wrapped in a robe in a hushed Paris hotel suite, 26-year-old entrepreneur and reality star Kylie Jenner—who reportedly has a net worth of $700 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth—is seated at her altar: a vanity. Her longtime hair and makeup artists—who are also her confidantes—hover around her like discreet, black-garbed hummingbirds, making imperceptible tweaks to her long dark hair and flawless skin. They chime in occasionally, telling me where they ate dinner the night before (pan-Asian restaurant Diep), and where Jenner would like to travel next (Iceland). It’s several hours before she has to be at the Acne fashion show, but for Jenner, getting ready is half, if not the whole, point. While we talk, she peers at her own reflection in the mirror.
Observing a member of the Kardashian-Jenner clan “do glam” is like watching Lindsey Vonn ski or Yo-Yo Ma play the cello. As it did for Momager and snatched, the stratospherically famous family popularized glam as both a verb and a noun on its reality shows, first on E!, now Hulu, over 24 total seasons. For matriarch Kris Jenner, her three daughters with the late Robert Kardashian, Kourtney, Kim, and Khloé, and her two daughters with ex Caitlin Jenner, Kendall and Kylie (there’s also Robert’s son, Rob), glam means getting your hair and makeup done. But it’s bigger than that: Do glam, be glam, and you’re ready to conquer the world. No one has profited more from the concept of glam than Kylie Jenner, the youngest of the siblings and the creator of a cosmetics empire that has been valued at over $1 billion.
In October, she launched Khy, a fashion line in partnership with co-founders Kris Jenner and Popular Culture’s Emma and Jens Grede, a married couple who are also involved in the multibillion-dollar juggernauts Skims and Good American. Khy—a play on a nickname of Jenner’s—will feature different guest designers and concepts throughout the year. The brand aims to produce investment pieces at an affordable price point.
The first drop offers black faux-leather pieces and nylon-and-elastane “base layers,” created in collaboration with the design duo Nan Li and Emilia Pfohl of Namilia, an edgy Berlin brand with a borderline-pornographic sense of humor. Namilia’s offerings include a “micro dick spike bag” and a “porn star” bra top.
Nothing in Khy’s first release costs over $200. The faux-leather pieces, including a voluminous trench and skintight dresses, feel very Mad Max meets 1980s Thierry Mugler. It’s the wardrobe of a biker babe during the apocalypse—who happens to have internet access and a Pilates-toned body.
The Khy office is on a “campus” in Los Angeles with other Popular Culture brands, including Good American, Skims, and Frame, the denim line Jens co-founded. Khy has about 25 employees, including an in-house design team that works alongside the brand’s guest designers. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Kardashian-Jenners and the Gredes are trying to build an accessible, social media-fueled fashion conglomerate—a Los Angeles LVMH.
Here are a few things Kylie Jenner revealed to WSJ. Magazine…
Jenner on her new line Khy:
“The whole line is really inspired by my personal wardrobe, and the different moods that I’m in,” Jenner says. She describes the first Khy drop as very “King Kylie—who I am at my core.”
Jenner on her singular vision:
“Creatively I have such a strong vision of what I want to look like and what I want to do and what I want to wear. There’s really no one telling me what to do,” she says.
Jenner on her business bona fides:
Jenner’s business bona fides and net worth were called into question after she appeared on a Forbes cover in 2018 that said she was “set to be the youngest-ever self-made billionaire.” Critics balked: self-made? The following year, the magazine published an article saying she had reached that milestone, then revoked the title the year after.
Jenner, for her part, says that she has not “inherited a dime” but understands why people responded so strongly. “I had such leverage to start with, coming from this famous family and having such a head start,” she says.
Kris Jenner on Kylie’s independent style streak, even as a child:
Her mother says Jenner “has actually been the creative director of her life and her wardrobe since she was able to walk.”
The Momager explains how Kylie’s room when she was little would look like a tornado had blown through in the mornings, with “boa feathers and somebody else’s high heels, one of her sister’s this or that.” On weekends she would entertain her older siblings and parents by perching on the edge of the pool table, singing Shakira songs in wild getups.
Designer Haider Ackermann, who designed Kylie’s Met Gala gown, on collaborating with the young mogul:
For this year’s Met Gala, Jenner asked Haider Ackermann, a somewhat under-the-radar, true fashion person’s designer, to create her look. She had attended the French-Colombian designer’s couture show for Jean Paul Gaultier in January in Paris, developing an interest in his work. “Kylie’s obviously very aware of what she likes,” says Ackermann. “She’s very aware of her body and how she sees things, which is very intriguing.”
“Our aesthetics are quite different,” admits Ackermann. “But to find something in between, it was just a way to honor our friendship to do this together. She is determined. She knows what she wants. She’s very confident in the choices. But so am I.”
“She grew up in the attention of the public eye from the age of 9,” he says. “And she’s always been very attracted to clothes, makeup, to everything that would make her world and imagination grow and be blown away. She’s always been seduced by it.”
Jenner on being a huge fan of sci-fi and Dune:
In their teens, she and Kendall worked with ghostwriters on a young-adult sci-fi series about twin sisters. While she cringes slightly at the memory, she still loves genre narratives like Game of Thrones. She’s seen House of the Dragon a mind-boggling five times already. And Dune, the Denis Villeneuve sci-fi saga starring Zendaya and Chalamet? Jenner smiles. “I do love that movie.”
Jenner on changing her son’s name from Wolf Jacques to Aire:
“That was the hardest thing that I’ve ever done in my life,” she says. “I’m still like, ‘Did I make the right decision?’ ” She remembers, “The postpartum hit, and the hormones, and I couldn’t even make a decision or think straight. And it just destroyed me. I could not name him. And I was like, ‘I feel like a failure. I don’t have a name for my son.’ So it took me a while. And then the longer I waited, the harder it was to name him.”
Jenner on how being a mother to Stormi transformed her ideas around beauty standards:
“My daughter has totally taught me a lot more about myself, and seeing myself in her has changed everything. I’ve had so much growth and am just embracing natural beauty,” she says. “I’m teaching her about mistakes that I made and making sure she knows she’s just perfect exactly how she is.”
Jenner on the beauty mistakes she feels she made:
Those mistakes, she says, include “surgery when I was younger. I’ve never touched my face, but just even getting my breasts done when I was 19 and getting pregnant soon after, not obviously planning to be pregnant at 19. And I was never insecure about myself. I actually was always super confident and loved my body. I was just having fun. I was influenced by amazing boobs and was like, that’s what I wanted to do, and had fun with it.”
Now, she realizes, “I probably just should have waited until I maybe had kids or let my body just develop.” She says that, for her, motherhood is about “teaching our kids to do better than us, be better versions of who we were.”
Kris Jenner on being nervous for her daughters when swarmed by fans:
Kris says she’s reminded of the risk to her daughters when they try to do something simple like take a walk and are mobbed by fans. “I worry about the girls safety-wise,” she says. “It can be very overwhelming.”
Jenner on reserving her anxiety for more important considerations:
“I never get too stressed about these things because… fashion is supposed to be fun.” She reserves her anxiety for her kids’ health, she says, not the trappings of her glamorous job. After all, it’s not so serious: “We’re playing dress-up.”
Jenner on her more careful approach to social media:
“As I grow older, I protect a lot more,” she says. “I think when I was younger, oh, my God, I used to post everything. That’s where I gained these hard-core fans, too, that are like family now and have grown with me. And I think just over time I guess the internet just got a little scarier maybe. And then I had children really young, which changed everything really.”
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Photos: Cass Bird for WSJ. Magazine.
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