Kendall Jenner’s Not-So-Hidden Talents: the Supermodel Does Way More Than You Think
Kendall Jenner is known for many things, among them, her rise to fame on her family’s E! show Keeping Up With the Kardashians and her prominent modeling career (she’s one of the highest-paid models in the U.S. right now). While modeling and reality television may be her main sources of income, they aren’t the only two things Jenner does with her time.
When she isn’t in front of the camera, Jenner is behind it — in fact, she photographed her sisters for their recent Calvin Klein campaign and frequently Instagrams professional photos she takes of her famous friends. Jenner has multiple passion projects, and if the model’s perfectly-curated Instagram feed is any indication, she looks good while doing them.
She’s a photographer
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bl_FRKfgt_P/?taken-by=kendalljenner
Jenner isn’t just toying with photography as a hobby — she’s shooting for large campaigns (like this Calvin Klein one of her sisters), chronicling the Met Gala for us mortals, and reportedly “bringing back film” photography. She made her editorial photography debut in July 2016 with a 10-page spread in Love magazine. In a more recent 72-page spread, she had the opportunity to photograph actress Sienna Miller, who called Jenner “really professional.”
Most recently, Jenner photographed the Kardashian-Jenner sister gathering as the faces of Calvin Klein Jeans and Calvin Klein Underwear’s Fall campaign. The primary photographer on set was Willy Vanderperre, but Jenner showed up ready to model as well as shoot with her Contax T2 for some exclusive behind-the-scenes pictures. “It’s nice being on set and getting to take pictures of my sisters again,” she told Vogue. “They’re all so beautiful, which makes them easy to photograph … These are good memories to have.”
Memories are one thing in life Jenner refuses to let slip through her perfectly manicured fingers, despite the other “regular experiences” she gives up as a member of one of America’s most famous families. While fellow Hollywood elite flaunted their looks on the 2018 Met Ball’s red carpet, Jenner posed for a few professional photographs before snapping pictures of her friends and family, and with an official press pass to boot.
“On any other occasion, these people might have thought I was a weirdo for taking their pictures, but since I had the official pass, I think it’s acceptable,” she said. She captured artist SZA, Tiffany Haddish, half-sister Kim Kardashian — you name it — all in their glamorous element.
She horseback rides
Jenner doesn’t forget her childhood passion or her roots. She spends significant time at Huntover show barn in Bell Canyon, California, a short five miles from her childhood home in Calabasas. Her self-dubbed “little barn,” is home to her two horses, Belle and Dylan, both European warmblood mares and trained jumpers.
Jenner got her first pony at age 10 while assisting a woman with multiple horses. “I rode with this lady from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., rode all her horses for her every day,” she said. When high schools started Jenner joined the cheerleading squad and started her modeling career — which effectively killed her time to ride. Years later she came to terms with what she wanted out of life, including more time for herself and her riding.
“I made it a point at the beginning of 2017 to consciously slow down, take more time for myself, be more selective and not just do whatever my agents tell me to do. I did [riding] my whole life—it was my life. I didn’t care for anything else, I didn’t care about boys. This is what makes me really happy.”
She’s a big reader
Jenner likes downtime as much as the rest of us — she even experiments with transcendental meditation — and enjoys a good read every now and then. Her favorites include A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Animal Farm. She turned her love of reading into another career and took a stab at writing alongside younger sister Kylie with their young adult novel Rebels: City of Indra: The Story of Lex and Livia.
The close sisters didn’t do any physical writing on the book — that credit goes to ghostwriter Maya Sloan — but contributed to the story’s plot, themes, and edits.
According to the publication, Sloan wrote the book, but the Jenners’ creative director, Elizabeth Killmond-Roman, points out that the girls and the writer had many meetings via Skype and Face-Time to discuss.
“Maya wanted to understand our lingo,” Kylie told the Times at the book’s 2014 release. “She’s super smart and just kind of adapted to us — remembering what we said and the way we talked.” Sloan advocated for her own writing and called the job a “gift.
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