#like we spent two whole years of my school career learning the book of Joshua

[goldyke]

Every time I see people responding to “this started way before October 7th” with “you’re right Jews have been here since fucking biblical times” or whatever I want to ask them to read Sefer Yehoshua (book of Joshua) which details how the ancient Jews colonized Israel the first time.

Like I’m not going to go back and criticize ancient history like that but I will say that it still doesn’t speak to indigeneity

[oscopelabs]

Evil in the Mirror: John Carpenter’s Revealing ‘Prince of Darkness’ by Joshua Rothkopf

[Last year, Musings paid homage to Produced and Abandoned: The Best Films You’ve Never Seen, a review anthology from the National Society of Film Critics that championed studio orphans from the ‘70s and ‘80s. In the days before the Internet, young cinephiles like myself relied on reference books and anthologies to lead us to films we might not have discovered otherwise. Released in 1990, Produced and Abandoned was a foundational piece of work, introducing me to such wonders as Cutter’s Way, Lost in America, High Tide, Choose Me, Housekeeping, and Fat City. (You can find the full list of entries here.) Our first round of Produced and Abandoned essays included Angelica Jade Bastién on By the Sea, Mike D’Angelo on The Counselor, Judy Berman on Velvet Goldmine, and Keith Phipps on O.C. and Stiggs. Over the next four weeks, Musings will continue with another round of essays about tarnished gems, in the hope they’ll get a second look. Or, more likely, a first. —Scott Tobias, editor.]

It’s generally accepted that John Carpenter wasn’t a personal filmmaker—not personal in the way that Martin Scorsese, only five years his senior and Italianamerican from the start, was. Carpenter grew up movie-crazy in the ’50s and ’60s. He wanted to make Westerns exactly at the moment when that became an unrealistic career goal. His heroes were Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and, above all, Howard Hawks. It’s been nourishing to listen to Amy Nicholson’s wonderful eight-part podcast Halloween Unmasked, still in progress, and to hear Carpenter—usually oblique in interviews—open up about his boyhood in the Jim Crow–era South. He mentions visiting an insane asylum during a college psych trip and locking eyes with a prisoner who spooked him. That may be the basis for killer Michael Myers but, by and large, this was a guy who wrote what he dreamed up, not what he knew.

That’s not to suggest Carpenter didn’t develop his own signature style. When he arrived in Los Angeles in 1968 to attend film school at USC, he reinvented himself, transforming from a Max Fischer–like creative wunderkind (he was a rock guitarist and high-school class president) into a laconic, bell-bottomed cowboy who listened more than he spoke. He was too cool for nerdy Dan O’Bannon, who worked with him on Dark Star. He was too cool for Hollywood itself, even after he’d succeeded there, rarely mingling socially and turning down projects like Top Gun and Fatal Attraction.

But the cool act was a bit of smokescreen. I once asked Carpenter about it, and he owned up to a private sense of pain in regard to his work. “I take every failure hard,” he told me in 2008, singling out the audience’s abandonment of The Thing, a remake of his favorite film (one that actually improves on its source). “The movie was hated. Even by science-fiction fans. They thought that I had betrayed some kind of trust, and the piling on was insane. Even the original movie's director, Christian Nyby, was dissing me.”

Carpenter would rebound from that 1982 commercial disaster—as well the indignity of getting sacked from Firestarter—by playing the game even better. He directed Jeff Bridges to a Best Actor nomination on Starman (that’s as rare as a unicorn for a sci-fi performance) and, just as things were turning golden, blew all his capital again on 1986’s Big Trouble in Little China, which was rushed and subsequently buried in the massive shadow of Aliens. “You try to make a studio picture your own, but in the end, it’s their film,” Carpenter said in our interview, the Kentucky rascal turned bitter. “And they’re going to get what they want. After that experience, I had to stop playing for the studios for a while and go independent again.”

This is the pivotal moment in Carpenter’s career, the one that fascinates me the most. It should fascinate more people, given what the filmmaker did. Divorced and with a two-year-old son, Carpenter is, at that point, 38 years old. He’s already feeling like a Hollywood burnout, with a decade of ups and downs to prove it. The solution was a pay cut, a big one: Prince of Darkness, financed through “supermensch” Shep Gordon and Alive Films and released in 1987, would be made for a grand total of $3 million, the first title in a multi-picture deal that guaranteed Carpenter complete creative control.

Scrappy but never chintzy, Prince of Darkness is the most lovable of movies. On the surface, it has all the cool minimalism a JC fan could ask for: elegant anamorphic compositions (Gary Kibbe’s muscular cinematography adds millions more in production value), a seesawing synth score, a one-location “siege” structure akin to the director’s Assault on Precinct 13 and The Thing. The movie also has Alice Cooper killing a grad student with a bicycle. It has a swirling canister of green Satanic goo in a church basement.

Critics, by and large, were unkind. In a representative review from the New York Times, Vincent Canby called it “surprisingly cheesy,” singling out first-time screenwriter Martin Quatermass for particular scorn (he “overloads the dialogue with scientific references and is stingy with the surprises”), not realizing that this was a pseudonym for Carpenter himself. Would it have mattered? Released days before Halloween, Prince got clobbered by the gig Carpenter turned down, Fatal Attraction, still surging in its sixth weekend.

But below the surface—and still a matter for wider appreciation—is the film that Carpenter dug himself out of his psychic hellhole to make: his most personal horror movie, starring a version of himself. Prince of Darkness is about watching and waiting. In a way, it’s a romantic view of the auteur’s own time at school. It’s a movie about the evil that stares out of the mirror (i.e., yourself). Like all of his films, it arrived under the possessive title John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness. In my mind, that apostrophe is actually a contraction: John Carpenter Is Prince of Darkness. And Prince of Darkness is him.

First, let’s understand what $3 million means in 1987. To compare it to some other movies of the same period, Blue Velvet’s budget is twice as large. Hannah and Her Sisters, largely shot in Mia Farrow’s apartment, was funded at $6.4 million. When Scorsese decided to go indie and make his audacious The Last Temptation of Christ, he had a $7 million allowance—and that’s for robes and sandals. Carpenter, on the other hand, would be doing practical special effects in camera. He’d be doing a movie with gore and supernatural nuttiness. In a now-quaint New York Times article from April 1987 titled “Independents Making It Big” (“The major studios have abandoned small, serious, risky films, the kind that often win prizes”), Merchant Ivory’s Oscar-winning A Room With A View gets prime positioning with a big photograph; that one has a $3 million budget, roughly. (Not coincidentally, Carpenter’s financiers, Alive Films, are name-checked in the piece as the producers of Alan Rudolph’s Trouble in Mind.)

Coming off Big Trouble in Little China’s estimated $20 million budget (it was probably more), Carpenter would be making a radical shift. But he agreed to Alive’s terms. He’d return to doing things fast and smart, to distilling his vision down to its cleanest, clearest grammar, to getting it done in 30 days (Halloween was shot in 20, over four weeks in May 1978). Even if you disregard the whole of Prince of Darkness’s content—and we won’t be doing that—Carpenter’s desire to work in total artistic freedom is breathtaking. He will do what it takes to move forward.

A little plot: In Prince of Darkness, scientists, theologians and academics plunge into a dilapidated church where they power up their equipment and study a mysterious genie in a bottle: an “anti-god.” The scenario has some of the pseudo-tech fizz of Poltergeist or, in a lighter vein, the Harold Ramis scenes in Ghostbusters. It’s not meant to hold up under scrutiny. Carpenter, who says he was reading books about quantum uncertainty at the time (maybe not the most comforting bedside material given his professional predicament), gives pages of chewy dialogue to the twin father figures of his oeuvre: Donald Pleasence, returning from Halloween and Escape from New York, plays an unnamed, worried priest; and Big Trouble’s wizened Victor Wong appears as an esteemed professor of metaphysical causality.

If the movie has a conventional hero (it doesn’t), it’s Brian, a student who splits the difference between creepy and generically handsome. He’s played by Jameson Parker, then a TV star on Simon & Simon. Or at least I think it’s Jameson Parker. Unlike his more famous San Diego private detective, Brian sports a robust, porn-star-worthy moustache. It makes him look swarthy, mysterious—a little like the lanky John Carpenter himself, who shoots these early scenes in classrooms and hallways at his alma mater, USC. “I spent many happy years at SC as a film student,” Carpenter says on Shout! Factory’s collector’s Blu-ray. “I really enjoyed myself. I learned everything about how to make movies there.”

Watching Prince of Darkness is as close as we’ll come to seeing the director’s formative years re-enacted, memoir-style. In getting back to basics, Carpenter decided to do it literally. Brian sits in class listening; he has a bit of a Laurie Strode moment looking out the window, distracted. Who is he? He’s a young scientist observing evil, almost flirting with it. He spies on a pretty girl in the courtyard (Lisa Blount). She’s got a boyfriend and it irks him, wordlessly. Later, Brian will woo her to bed and use some hard-core Howard Hawks dialogue on her: “Who was he? The one that gave you such a high opinion of men?” he says, straight out of Lauren Bacall’s playbook in To Have and Have Not. It works. She kisses him.

The movie isn’t all wish-fulfillment. In fact, it’s charming how fully the Carpenter surrogate recedes into the team; Brian isn’t even a factor in the final showdown. Maybe his job is to watch other people vanquish evil. That would make sense, since it’s his creator’s comfort zone. In the meantime, the offscreen Carpenter is building some of his grossest sequences, spraying unsuspecting people in the mouth with streams of ectoplasm (à la Rob Bottin’s landmark FX in The Thing), mounting parallel action and deploying beetles, maggots and ants where necessary.

Prince of Darkness has one moment that’s proven unforgettable, transcending even the horror genre. It’s an eerie transmission, the voice slowed down and distorted: “This is not a dream…not a dream…” DJ Shadow samples it a few times on his groundbreaking debut, 1996’s Endtroducing. (The voice is actually Carpenter’s, impossible not to notice once you’ve been made aware of it.) He’s supposed to be a future dude reaching backward in time—“from the year one, nine, nine, nine”—maybe to prevent a biblical apocalypse. All we see is a jittery handheld shot of a silhouetted robed figure slowly emerging from the church, the ominous end-of-the-world smoke gathering.

The economy of the shot is beautiful, Carpenter achieving the texture of a half-remembered nightmare using only a capture-video-off-a-TV-screen trick. (It’s very Inland Empire—and come to think of it, that basement cylinder of swirling green evil is a lot like the glass box from the first episode of the rebooted Twin Peaks: The Return.) So in a situation where Carpenter is facing his most prohibitive spending limits, he’s actually expanding his craft. Prince of Darkness signals his own creative rehabilitation after turning his heel on the studios. Or, to quote the film’s poster: “It is evil. It is real. It is awakening.”

What does it mean that Carpenter’s big payoff involves a mirror? These Cocteau-like shots were some of the most dangerous to pull off. One of them involved plunging a prosthetic hand into highly toxic liquid mercury (a substance the crew had to drain from their hydraulic cranes just to make the gag work). Then, to capture the action on the “other side” of the mirror, poor Lisa Blount had to swim submerged in a darkened swimming pool while an underwater camera shot upward at the glimmering surface. I include these technical details not only to express awe at Carpenter’s commitment (along with that of his collaborators), but also to stress the obvious: The mirror climax was really important to him. The movie’s final seconds are the whole of Prince of Darkness’s reflexivity in a single cut: Brian, woken from a double dream, approaches his bedroom mirror. We see from the perspective of the glass. He touches that porn ’stache tentatively, then reaches out. Cut to black.

It’s not easy to touch that mirror—to walk away from everything you’ve labored to achieve over years, to a place where it’s just you and your talent and what you can do. To me, that’s what Prince of Darkness expresses, subtly. Creatively, the experiment worked: It led directly to Carpenter’s 1988 stealth masterpiece They Live, his most confident political statement and a kindred project in its use of real L.A. locations. That film’s critical reputation has already been defended at large. But maybe it’s time to rally behind the moment slightly earlier, when the director had to rediscover who he was, and what he wanted—and when he found a way to turn everything around.

[sunshinekarliekloss]

Conquering fashion and crushing tech, Karlie Kloss is just getting started

Taking an Australian to an Australian restaurant is a very Karlie Kloss thing to do.

Heartily recommending dishes (green goddess salad! Avocado toast!) and knowing everyone who works at the joint (Two Hands in N.Y.C.’s TriBeCa neighborhood) is also très Karlie Kloss. Almost 10 years in, her modeling career has encompassed more runways than JFK, more covers than a ... cover band, and more campaigns than some presidents (Swarovski, Express, L’Oréal, Adidas). But the St. Louis–raised Kloss remains a Midwestern girl who was brought up right. She’s two years into Kode with Klossy, her 10-city (and growing) program to inspire young girls to learn coding and enter the tech world, and over a year into her feminist studies at NYU (complemented handily by today’s look: a Dior T-shirt that says “We Should All Be Feminists”). But right now she’s just going to extend her illegally long legs under the table for a chat. LAURA BROWN: At the British Fashion Awards in London last December, you were posing away on the red carpet in a sparkly Swarovski thing, and it was freezing. I just thought, “How does she keep turning up and doing that?” KARLIE KLOSS: First of all, I’m a Leo, so when I need to turn it on, I do. I enjoy the adrenaline—not just when I’m walking the red carpet but also when I’m on set or in a runway show or even in the small film things I’ve done. I don’t know; I’m going to throw it to being a Leo because I have no other explanation! But I also know the feeling of being spent. What happens when you’re spent? I book myself out. I take time. I shut off. I don’t post to social media for a couple of days, and I find that to be really rewarding and healthy. It actually reenergizes me to be able to turn it back on and have fun. We’re multitasking women; we all have a lot going on. But you also have to protect yourself physically, mentally, and emotionally and give yourself time. “Book yourself out”: I know that’s a model term, but metaphorically, it’s a good idea too. Yeah. Because you know what? It’s not a matter of being lazy—the returns are tenfold: You’ll be able to show up with more energy, more drive, more focus. It’ll pay off. Are you type A? I don’t know if I’m type A. I’m super-driven, but I’m not a perfectionist. Women are always told we can have it all, but acknowledging your limitations is a wonderful thing too. There’s a beauty in knowing what you can’t do. There’s also a beauty in not trying to figure it all out. Things like Kode with Klossy happened because after graduating from high school, I was fully focusing on my modeling career but at a certain point was uninspired. That’s why I started taking a coding class. When you sat down for that first coding class, did it feel like, “Oh, great!” or “Oh, s—!”? I only got myself into that first coding class because I was genuinely curious about it and I met someone who started the Flatiron School … I am someone who if you tell me I have to do something, I’m less inclined to do it, but I took that class because I was really interested in how all this works. It’s how the world is actually built. Code is the secret language that builds all the digital architecture of everything that we rely on. And pretty much a fraction of people know about it, yet we all use it. I’ve always been intrigued by the direction nobody else is going in. Not following the herd. If anything, the herd is following you, especially when you’re, like, 7 feet in heels. Honestly, I never owned a pair of heels until I became a model. I remember buying a pair of black high heels from Target in St. Louis because I had to practice learning how to walk in them. OK, set the scene for me, please. I had just turned 15—now 18 is the minimum age to model—and started high school on a Monday, and by Friday I was on a plane to New York for a casting call. I thought, “There’s no way anyone is going to book me for New York Fashion Week, but it’s good to go and see people.” I had my high heels from Target and a little black dress from Macy’s that my mom bought me. It became my lucky little black dress that I continued to wear again and again. That was the outfit I was wearing when I walked into Calvin Klein in 2008 and got cast in the show that launched my career. I look back at photos, and I’m like, “How and why did anybody book me?” I was a child! But I was a very tall child. I’ve always been kind of an old soul, I guess.

You’ve always read older. I’m still surprised at how young you are. I really loved those years. And it was so different. The whole digital situation was different. Do you think social media makes it harder or easier to succeed? I think it’s a different ball game. You have to have a strong presence on the runway, schlep around the world to build a book for editorial, work with the right people, and be in the right campaigns. You also have to have a digital presence and brand yourself. Maybe it’s easier to break through now because it’s democratized. It’s not like there are three important people in the fashion industry who are going to say, “Yes, you’re going to be successful.” It’s the people’s choice. Right, and that’s what’s really interesting. Something can become successful if it’s a good idea or if it’s going against the grain. It’s hard to predict. It’s important to have constants in all this, right? How do you manage a relationship with all your travel and everything else? [Kloss dates venture capitalist and health-care entrepreneur Joshua Kushner.] You make it work. We’ve been together almost five years. Time flies. It’s crazy. He’s a super-solid dude. Is it nice to know someone’s there? Yeah. I’ve always been super-close with my family. They are my rock. There’s so much uncertainty in every direction, like, “Are you gonna get this job?” So having a solid crew, whether it’s your family or a partner, that’s a big part of being able to function. What does being a feminist mean to you? Actually, I’m taking a feminism class at NYU right now. It’s about the political history of feminism, really, since the ’60s and ’70s. The term “feminism” means different things to different people; a lot of people throw it around without really understanding the weight of it because it is layered. Two women can identify as feminists and have wildly different ways of living their lives. I love what Maria Grazia [Chiuri] is doing at Dior. She’s such a powerhouse. Having women in leadership positions is so important. Hopefully it will happen in the White House someday. Would you ever consider making a run for the White House? Never say never, right? So, we did a superhero shoot together for InStyle. Who’s your real-life superhero? My mom, for sure. She battled really aggressive breast cancer when my three sisters and I were young. She survived by the skin of her teeth. I’ve grown up completely idolizing her. She’s so strong. Were you ever into superheroes? Wonder Woman, of course! First of all, she’s got great style, hair, and accessories. And I love that she’s fearless. She doesn’t need a man. She’s so independent. Where would you go if you could fly an invisible jet? I would love to be able to fly, period. Being invisible would be amazing. I’m 6'2", so it’s hard to be invisible, but at times I love just being a people-watcher, whether it’s in a café or the places I travel. Do you have days when you’re not recognized? I put on a baseball hat and jeans and a T-shirt and nobody pays attention to me. It’s great. I hope that never changes. Maybe when you hit 25 and get real old. Hopefully I’ll start shrinking too! When was the moment you knew you’d made it in your career? I haven’t hit that moment yet, but when I bought my apartment in New York six years ago, that felt like a major milestone. So you had a mortgage at 18? Yeah. All my friends were, like, just getting their driver’s licenses.

What do you spend your money on? I am very ambitious as an entrepreneur and as a businesswoman, but it doesn’t matter how much money I make. I am frugal. I spend money on experiences. I like to take amazing vacations with my loved ones. I like property. I just bought a beautiful home in St. Louis. That must be wonderful—coming back home with such success. You know what’s crazy? I bought the house I used to babysit in. My only job before modeling was a $6-an-hour babysitting gig, which, by the way, was great. I feel like I have this Cinderella story, and I’m really grateful for it. It was not the path I was anticipating. Anyway, it’s come full circle for me. I always loved that house. What’s something you do every day that would surprise people? Indulge in chocolate in some form. Chocolate is my weakness. It’s my Kryptonite. If you’re really on a bender, what do you do? What’s your “f— it bucket”? Halo Top ice cream. It’s lower in calories. I’ll smash a whole pint. I have a sweet tooth. That’s how Karlie’s Kookies happened, because I love sweets. You’re super-diligent about working out. Do you try to keep it to a certain time every day? I like to work out in the morning and get it out of the way because it changes how I function the rest of the day. I feel more awake and am more aware of what I eat. Since I’m always traveling and in a different place, I started running. I love running in Paris and upstate New York. I also love strength training. If I work out, it doesn’t immediately change my body, but it changes my clarity, focus, and emotions. My job right now is reliant on my body, but that’s genuinely not why I work out. What’s your favorite thing to do? Do you cook a lot at home? I love to cook. I love going to the market and getting fresh stuff and just getting creative. How ambitious are you? I want Kode with Klossy to grow. Last summer we had three camps with 20 girls in each one. This summer we have 15 camps in 10 cities and 20 to 25 girls in each class. All of this and you’re not type A? I’m grateful that I’m successful at 24 in a way that I never imagined I would be. I feel lucky I started working at 15—it’s been almost 10 years. I feel like a geezer! What was the last thing you bought for yourself? I bought this sick handpainted Gucci leather jacket. It was from a special collaboration. My frugal self broke the bank on that one. And also the house. [Laughs] What’s your favorite thing that you’ve worn out lately? It was this cute little Dior sleeveless dress that was just way sexy and athletic. I loved it. Most important, where are the Target shoes now? My mom has the first crayon drawing I ever made, so I’m sure those shoes are in a box somewhere in the Kloss attic. (x)

[sunshinekarliekloss]

Why Karlie Kloss is proud to be a computer geek

CONSIDER the supermodel; long limbs, sharp cheekbones, killer smile. American clotheshorse Karlie Kloss ticks all of these boxes, but beyond the photogenic attributes, she possesses traits less indicative of someone who has spent almost a decade in front of the camera.

The one-time Victoria’s Secret model and member of Taylor Swift’s inner circle — aka “squad” — Kloss is carving out a name for herself in realms far from fashion. She’s appeared in Zoolander 2, but has also worked on philanthropic projects and is studying at university. The 24-year-old will also work on an upcoming TV science series for Netflix, Bill Nye Saves The World. She announced her role as correspondent with the words: “We’ll be talking about every nerdy thing you can dream of.”

Her interest in science technology has led to Kloss being lauded by former US President Barack Obama as a “supermodel and super-coder” when she visited the White House during its Science Fair last year.

That’s not her only connection to the highest office in the US. Her boyfriend, entrepreneur Joshua Kushner, is the brother of Jared Kushner, who is married to Ivanka Trump and now holds the title of senior adviser to President Donald Trump — although Joshua and Kloss publicly supported Hillary Clinton’s run for office. Although such matters are often deemed “no-go” zones for interviews, her minders needn’t worry, because this is one whip-smart model who can definitely handle herself.

When Stellar meets with Kloss, she’s halfway through a whirlwind trip to Australia — her first — to work with David Jones as the face of its autumn/winter collection, for which she recently headlined their new-season launch. On set at The University of Sydney for our photo shoot, the model’s time is limited by a frenetic schedule, but her experience shows. While she admits to suffering jet lag, there’s no visible trace as she works her angles; she remains focused when workmen make a racket moving steel poles behind her, and when tourists stop and stare at her 1.9m-frame posing for the camera.

Kloss puts everyone at ease, nails her shots in minutes and improvises when minor issues, such as the shoes proving several sizes too small, crop up. When she spies one of the shots on the photographer’s monitor, Kloss is quick to proclaim herself happy with the results, and it’s clear the praise is meant as a compliment to the stylists and crew.

The academic setting of the university for the shoot was chosen specifically for Kloss, given education bookends her life in fashion thus far. “The hyphenate I’m most proud of is ‘student’,” she says of her many job titles. Apart from her day job, Kloss is working towards a degree at New York University, where she enrolled in 2015.

“It’s been a good challenge. I like having something to focus on outside of fashion; the structure and discipline of school and having deadlines.”

Taking on multiple roles has been part of Kloss’s life for as long as she’s been a model. Discovered at auditions for a charity fashion show in her small town just outside of St Louis, Missouri, her career took off when she was just 15.

“I had no idea what was ahead, it’s all been at hyper-speed,” she says of her start in the fashion world. “High school started and [New York] Fashion Week was two days afterwards. I went to New York for the weekend, walked for Calvin Klein and I didn’t come back to school for the rest of that week. So then I had to figure out how to juggle the two — but I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

Kloss worked hard to maintain her high-school workload and friendships with peers, and while it required dedication to complete her studies, she clearly enjoyed the opportunities that came with her modelling career, even at such an early age.

“That was a surreal four years,” she says of her time in high school. “I lived this double life of being a normal teenager with my best friends and my sisters, and going to prom and being very, very normal. And then [it was] this Cinderella life, where I would go to Paris, walk in the Chanel couture show, work with Karl Lagerfeld, work with all of these incredible designers and, you know, meet brilliant people in this world that I never knew existed. That was a huge learning curve and it hasn’t slowed down since. [It] was almost like a movie.”

Kloss says her parents encouraged her entry into the modelling industry, and viewed it as a means to a less conventional education alongside her high-school studies. “My parents have been very supportive, more so than I would be as a parent,” she says. “They had the confidence in me, in knowing that travelling and having exposure to different cultures is one of the best educations you could have. It wasn’t like they shipped me off — they were with me every step of the way.”

Nevertheless, Kloss, who says she would have become a teacher or doctor had the fashion world not beckoned, is proud of the fact she maintained her “normal” life, too. “I went to prom with my friends, I graduated at the same time as everyone; I just did a lot of my classes as independent study,” she says. “I was on track with all my peers, and was in class for a portion of the week, but had to be self-disciplined to do the work and learning outside.”

Kloss lights up when talking about her high-school results (“I was very proud of my grades”), which were good enough to grant her entry into the prestigious New York University. But it was before she enrolled in tertiary studies that she happened upon another interest: coding. Kloss took a short course to satisfy her curiosity about technology.

“It came out of wanting to understand what code is; to understand the fundamentals of what powers technology, how it’s built, both the hardware and the software,” she says.

While she felt empowered by what she learnt — she’s also created a few apps as a hobby — Kloss realised that women were under-represented professionally in the field. So in 2015 she started Kode with Klossy, which offers scholarships for girls and women who want to expand their coding skills or career. “The more people you can empower with that knowledge or those skills, the more incredible things that are going to be built in our future as we become more reliant on that technology,” she says.

She’s also led the way for others in the fashion industry to become supporters of women acquiring tech skills. Vogue Australia editor-in-chief Edwina McCann says Kloss’s work sparked the launch of Vogue Codes, a weekend seminar that started last year as part of a campaign to draw women into technology-based careers. “We realised our audience in Australia was really responding to what Karlie was doing. She was a catalyst for driving us to become involved with this very quickly,” McCann says.

McCann adds that Kloss is the only model she knows of who has made the connection between science and fashion, and that in doing so she has the potential to influence many young women and their vocational choices.

“Having role models like Karlie saying computer engineering is cool is changing the whole language around, not just coding itself, but being involved with technology,” she tells Stellar.

Coding is not the only interest that Kloss has managed to turn into a charitable enterprise. She has also developed a line of biscuits sold in North America, the proceeds of which funds school lunches for children in need.

Kloss says both projects came about organically, but that she’s always had a desire to provide for others. “I would always bring cookies to shoots. I have a sweet tooth, but I also try to be a more healthy baker, and I started this thing called Karlie’s Kookies. It’s still ongoing, and we’ve donated over a million school lunches. So that was just on a whim.

“I didn’t set out to be a philanthropist, but any opportunity I can [take] to help others while doing what I enjoy doing is kind of the way I live my life.”

While her career frequently takes her across the globe (“I look back at 2016 and I was bouncing between countries as though taking the subway”), Kloss credits her family, and growing up in a close-knit community, with cultivating her instinct for goodwill. “It’s the kind of place where there’s one main grocery store, and you walk the aisles and it’s like social hour — you see everyone.

“I like helping people, it’s like something that drives me and makes me happy. I grew up in a small town where everybody just helps everybody. Nobody was particularly well off, but you figure out how to get everybody what they need,” she says.

Kloss also knows that her celebrity status — she has more than six million followers on Instagram — has given her a unique opportunity to take on philanthropic causes.

“[Modelling’s] a foot in the door, and it’s what you do with it. I’ve been really lucky to stay doing it, because it’s such a fast-moving industry. I’ve seen so many people come and go, but I think what keeps the industry interested in me is that I want to do so much more with it.

“I don’t just want to show up and be in a photo, I see it as an opportunity to have a platform and a voice to help do great things and make an impact on the world in a positive way.”

Despite all that Kloss has achieved, she does have detractors. One celebrity gossip website questioned her ability to dedicate herself to her studies after she started university, and another news outlet made light of her admission, via social media, that she was nervous about going back to school, implying that she should be more concerned about her modelling duties than study.

Kloss is aware of the criticism, but is quick to deconstruct the notion that models can’t be beautiful and smart.

“There are definitely misconceptions,” she says. “Modelling is incredibly hard work, not necessarily in the same way as other professions, but you have to be very focused. Generally you start at a young age, so you have to be smart. If it’s not in a ‘book smarts’ way, it’s certainly in a ‘street smarts’ way.

“So many models I’m good friends with are studying. Modelling is a career that usually is not anticipated, it kind of happens to you. A lot of us have other life plans and career paths and passions that don’t stop when you become a model; it’s a misconception, I think, on many levels.” She pauses for a moment, then grins, “But it makes me happy to prove everyone wrong.” (x)