She walked sixty-four runway shows in a single fashion season — a record-shattering blitz that announced a teenager from suburban St. Louis as the runway’s most in-demand face. But the more improbable headline came a decade later, when that same supermodel took the CEO’s chair at i-D, one of the most influential magazines in fashion history. Karlie Kloss is the rare model who turned a catwalk into a boardroom — and bought the very kind of publication that once put her on its cover.
From a St. Louis dance studio to the runway
Karlie Kloss was born on 3 August 1992 in Chicago, Illinois, the second of four daughters of an emergency-room physician and a freelance art director, and when she was two the family moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where she was raised. As a child she trained in classical ballet, a discipline she has repeatedly credited as the foundation of her runway walk. She was discovered at a local benefit fashion show in 2005 and, at the age of fourteen, signed with Elite Model Management; she graduated from her St. Louis high school in 2011, even as her modelling career was already going global.
The work: a record-breaking runway career
Kloss’s ascent was meteoric and statistically remarkable. In her breakout New York Fashion Week season she walked thirty-one shows in the city and sixty-four across the international circuit — one of the most prolific seasons any model has ever logged — and she quickly became one of the most in-demand runway faces of the early 2010s, fronting campaigns for Christian Dior, Coach, Calvin Klein, Marc Jacobs, Chanel and Louis Vuitton, among many others. Her magazine presence was equally dominant; by 2019 she had appeared on some forty international Vogue covers. Her most famous chapter was Victoria’s Secret: she debuted in the brand’s fashion show in 2011 and served as one of its official Angels from 2013 to 2015, before stepping back to enroll at university. Forbes ranked her among the world’s highest-paid models through the mid-2010s, placing her near the very top of its list.
What made the run remarkable was not just its volume but its range. Kloss could anchor a severe high-fashion show in Paris and front a mass-market American campaign in the same week, her long, athletic line lending itself to looks designers built specifically around her. For the better part of a decade she was a fixture of the front rank, booked relentlessly across the editorial and commercial worlds at once — the kind of dependable, camera-ready presence the industry returns to season after season, and a rare model whose face could sell both couture and cosmetics with equal ease.
From the runway to the boardroom
What sets Kloss apart from almost every peer is what she built off the catwalk. In 2018 she became host and executive producer of the rebooted Project Runway, cementing a transition from model to media personality. But her defining act of cultural impact came from technology: after taking a coding class herself, she founded Kode With Klossy in 2015, a nonprofit running free coding camps for girls and gender-nonconforming teenagers. Pairing a supermodel’s visibility with a mission to close the gender gap in tech, it became central to her public identity — and a striking departure from the path most models take after the runway.
The pivot to technology was not a vanity side project. Kloss has spoken about wanting to use the platform her face had given her to open a door that had long been closed to girls like the ones in her camps, and she built the programme with the seriousness of a founder rather than the gloss of a celebrity endorsement. That instinct — to convert visibility into something owned and lasting — would come to define the second half of her career as clearly as the runway defined the first.
A media proprietor
By the 2020s Kloss had reinvented herself as a media owner. In 2020 she co-led an investor group that acquired W magazine, and in November 2023, through her company Bedford Media, she bought the storied British title i-D out of bankruptcy and installed herself as its CEO. She has since announced plans to revive other classic titles. It is an almost unheard-of arc in fashion: the model who spent a decade being photographed for magazines now owns them, and decides who appears in their pages.
The Private Side
Kloss met the venture capitalist Joshua Kushner in 2011, when she was nineteen. The couple dated for several years and married on 18 October 2018 in an intimate ceremony in upstate New York, followed by a larger celebration the next summer. They have three children: sons Levi Joseph, born in 2021, and Elijah Jude, born in 2023, and a daughter, Rae Florence, born in 2025. Kloss has largely kept her family life private even as her professional one has grown ever more public, balancing the demands of three young children with running a media company.
Earnings and net worth
Karlie Kloss’s personal net worth is most commonly estimated by celebrity-finance trackers in the tens of millions of dollars — a figure that is an unverified third-party estimate rather than an audited or disclosed number, and that is frequently and incorrectly conflated with the far larger fortune of her husband, a separate matter entirely. What is documented is the trajectory: a record-setting runway career, years near the top of the Forbes models list, television, and now ownership of the magazines that built her fame.
Where she is now
As of 2026, Kloss leads Bedford Media and i-D, continues to run Kode With Klossy, makes selective runway appearances, and is raising three children. She has completed one of the most unusual evolutions in modern fashion — from the most-booked runway model of the 2010s into a media executive who owns the platforms that once defined the industry she came up in. Few models have ever turned their visibility into that kind of ownership; fewer still have done it on their own terms.