Kaia Gerber Knows What You’re Thinking

Magazine: Kaia Gerber sees new plays whenever she can—particularly small, off-Broadway plays. That is how she and I came to be at a theater on the Upper East Side of Manhattan on a balmy night in September. Kaia had chosen a drama about two women confronting the consequences of the new spate of anti-abortion laws. Though neither of us knew much about the play ahead of time, Kaia is drawn to difficult subjects that can lead to interesting discussions. After an intense 70 minutes without an intermission, we were both eager to discuss what we’d just seen. We stood in front of the theater waiting for our car, wondering about the actual details of the Texas anti-abortion law described in the play. But we’d only traded a few sentences when a tall man in a quarter-zip fleece stepped forward and interrupted us. “Oh man!” he said, addressing Kaia. “Did that make any sense at all?”

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ROLE PLAY
Kaia’s career balances modeling and acting, and she has parts in interesting-sounding 2025 projects—in the film Mother Mary directed by David Lowery, and a comedy series from Benito Skinner called Overcompensating

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Kaia regarded him with a friendly, patient half-smile—an inscrutable look that was neither inviting nor off-​putting. I guessed it was a Kaia specialty.

He did not wait for a response and answered his own question: “Ridiculous. I mean, it makes no sense. Once that premise came on—”

“They lost you,” Kaia said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Anyway.” And Kaia and I turned toward each other, ever so slightly closing ranks. “Alright,” he finished, and scuttled away. Then our big black car arrived, and we escaped into it. Once we were in the car, though, Kaia immediately pointed out the irony of his interrupting us. The play had been about unseen men passing laws with an appalling outcome for the pregnant woman.

“I love a man being like, ‘Did that make any sense?’ ” Kaia said.

We shook our heads, and laughed. “The people who are making the decisions—like that gentleman—don’t understand,” she said. After more discussion, she added, “Have you read bell hooks’s The Will to Change? It’s really a wonderful meditation on men and masculinity and just how patriarchy actually is bad for all of us.”

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Because of how she looks and who she is—a famous model, and the daughter of a famous model—Kaia notices people’s assumptions about her in a more concentrated way. She told me that when someone brings up an author or a book, she’ll sometimes respond with deadpan obliviousness: “Who? What’s that?” And then she’ll watch the reaction. Some people catch that she’s putting them on, but others launch into pedantic explanations. She plays dumb and lets them go on but notes to herself that she now knows what they really think of her. “It is quite entertaining…to see them react to me,” she told me. She plays with this stereotype in her acting roles as well. In 2023’s Bottoms, a movie that delights in upending many tropes about women, Kaia is a character who looks like the perfect cheerleader but who is actually all business, who can throw and take a punch, and who is aware of how reductively she is perceived. In her latest film, Saturday Night, Kaia plays another misunderstood beauty, Chevy Chase’s second wife, Jacqueline Carlin, who is eager to get involved in the action. Kaia felt protective of her. “She actually was an intellectual woman who helped him write and had a lot to offer.”

I had not made the mistake of underestimating Kaia, as I had spent the past week listening to the interviews she does for Library Science, the online book club she runs with her good friend Alyssa Reeder. They created it in 2020 as a space in which reading contemporary fiction is cool (many photos on Instagram of books as aesthetically compelling objects) but also taken seriously while being unpretentious and inviting. The project is informed by Kaia and Alyssa’s idiosyncratic, edgier, less commercial sensibility, with Kaia conducting the discussions. She’s a serious and erudite reader: There she was talking passionately about Jean Valentine and Anne Carson when she interviewed novelist and poet Kaveh Akbar for February’s pick, Martyr! In Kaia’s conversation with Anahid Nersessian (writer and poetry editor at Granta) about the September pick—Virginie Despentes’s Dear Dickhead, a hilariously profane novel that addresses the complexities of sexual harassment and addiction—Kaia mentions one of her favorite books is Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School. They discuss I Love Dick by Chris Kraus and the difference between soft feminism and Despentes’s version, which seeks to discomfort readers. Kaia spoke about the catharsis found in reading about rage. In fact, many of the club’s picks are sharp-edged books by women, like Role Play by Clara Drummond, a scathing, provocative satire. What surprised me when I finally met Kaia in person was not that she was smart and literary, but that someone who seemed so sweet and agreeable was drawn to such confrontational books.

Kaia had chosen Monkey Bar for our pretheater dinner, the clubby 1936 restaurant in Midtown at the Hotel Elysée. The entrance takes you through the original narrow bar lined with the murals of monkeys drinking and playing cards, where a crowd was already lining up for cocktails. I was early, so I watched the door. I don’t know what I expected—an untouchable supernova of beauty that would instantly tilt the room’s attention toward her. Instead, Kaia entered and hesitated, in a loose floral dress partly covered by a black jacket, with bare legs and black ballet flats, her long brown hair falling over her unmade-up, perfect face. I approached her and she immediately smiled and embraced me in a warm hug.

The dining room was brighter and less crowded—it had been renovated in the aughts with curved red leather banquettes, mirrored pillars, and a giant Edward Sorel mural that pays tribute to an earlier era’s habitués. Almost as soon as we sat down, Kaia told me that she had read my last novel (which, as it happens, contains some scenes of female rage). After we ordered, I remarked that her interest in books like Despentes’s seemed counter to her unassuming demeanor. She told me, “I’ve always been quite mild-tempered. My family called me the easy one. I didn’t need anything. And I kind of prided myself on not having big feelings.” But she loves characters in novels and plays who express intense emotions. They are “a reminder that you can have these feelings…. I didn’t always feel like there was space for it, to be honest. I was always so aware of how privileged I grew up…. Everything that happened to me, I thought, But there’s so much worse happening to other people. And that perspective, while good to have, can also be damaging if you don’t take your own pain seriously.”

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Reading is one place she explores her darker depths. The other place is in her acting. She told me about working with her movement coach. “It’s about being in your body,” she said. “You do a lot of repetitive movements to fatigue the parts that are second nature. It’s all about getting—acting—closer to the bone. I’ve really learned about where we store our trauma.” Sometimes laughter or tears can come through this work, as a memory floods over you. She described a scene in which she had to get really angry. She told her coach it would be difficult because she didn’t access that part of herself often. But after an hour, her coach said, “Yeah, you’re fine. You can act that.” “You need a place to put it,” she said of these feelings. The actor Cory Michael Smith, who played opposite Kaia in Saturday Night, told me that she’s “a collection of dichotomies.” When he first met her, “she immediately was really sensitive and kind to me, but she’s a very fierce person.” I asked what he meant, and he explained that she’s “easygoing and playful, but I don’t think someone would want to take advantage of Kaia. And that’s because of her intelligence.” Marc Jacobs, who chose Kaia for her first big gig as one of the faces of his beauty line, told me something similar about her as a model. “She doesn’t get involved in the drama. And it’s not because she’s better than, or that she has any sort of arrogance. It’s none of that. She’s just that person. In a sea of chaos, it’s quite calming to be with Kaia.” The first time he worked with her, he was surprised by her transformation in front of a camera. “I guess it’s the same with performers in a way, where they’re a little shy and they’re not the extroverts that you thought they would be until they get onstage or until they get on set,” Jacobs said. “And then all of a sudden it’s like, What? And that’s some of the magic of fashion or theater or dance—that it all comes out.”

When I joined Kaia the next day for a Vogue shoot on Walker Street in Tribeca, I would understand what Marc meant. While she was being filmed, she seemed to transform, to become somehow more self-​contained, able to collect attention and hold it. She wore a pair of giant Celine glasses with clear lenses. On another, plainer face, and on a person with less confidence, they might look nerdy. On Kaia, the glasses emphasized that the eyes you are gazing at are gazing back. Maybe they were another stab at the cliché that a model can’t have an intellect. Or maybe they were a kind of flex: She can wear anything and her beauty only looks more dramatic.

Yet the funny thing is that Kaia absolutely is a nerd. To relax, Kaia organizes her house, printing labels with her label maker. It helps her feel in control, she said, and it’s satisfying when you press the button and the label prints out. What does she do to de-stress once everything is labeled? “I open a drawer and start organizing.” But it wasn’t just that. Kaia and I talked at length about things like using a highlighter versus using a pencil while reading. I even gave her my favorite brand of pencil to keep—a Blackwing 602—and the next day she was as enthusiastic about it as if I had just given her a Celine clutch (which, of course, she already has). When I mentioned that I teach a class on satire, she asked me to show her the syllabus.

Maybe a better way of putting it is that Kaia is studious, this despite—or maybe because of—not attending college. Her modeling career took her in a different direction, but it was a choice she’s glad she made, as in high school she didn’t relate to many people her own age. One friend she did make in her early teens is the singer Gracie Abrams, who wrote this to me about Kaia: “I always remember having the sense that she was somebody who knew herself very well, even at that age. Nothing about Kaia is surface-​level fluff—it’s all much deeper.” Traveling around the world was more interesting to Kaia than attending school. But she still found ways to study.

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When Kaia first moved to New York, another model introduced her to Jonah Freud, who was attending college in the city. He’s British and came from a background of artists and intellectuals, and was obsessed with books. Jonah became one of her best friends and a kind of “college professor,” she said. He would share his syllabi with her. He took her to McNally Jackson and helped her pick titles. She told him, “I can’t read Camus, and he was like, ‘Why not?’  ” So they would read and discuss everything from Plato to Rimbaud to Renata Adler. Jonah now runs one of her favorite places, Reference Point, a rare-book library and bar in London. It partly inspired Library Science, she told me, with its vision of making books accessible to young people. “It doesn’t have to feel pretentious,” she told me. “It’s pretentious if you make it pretentious. And in fact, talking and connecting through books is the opposite of pretentious.” When I spoke to Jonah, he was effusive about Kaia. “She is a voracious reader,” he told me. “Wildly astute and observant.” Jonah has a cinematic charisma: He pinched some tobacco in a rolling paper as he spoke and rolled it into a perfect cigarette that he lit and smoked. It was a refreshingly old-school analog gesture in this day of vapes and Zyn pouches. He, like Kaia, reveres physical books. Partly it is their appealing tactile qualities, but also there’s the desire to focus amid so much endless digital information. “Overexposure to the totality of human knowledge all at once” makes it “hard to dig in,” he said. Jonah, Kaia, and Alyssa all spoke of the need for curation, and of the longing for communal experiences, of the human touch. Jonah told me that “algorithms, which are there to try and help us filter through some of the stuff that interests us, end up becoming a very narrow type of curation…. We end up going from an infinitely large place to an infinitely small place.” Kaia, he added, “cuts through some of that noise” with her book club. “Contemporary curation is about deep reading and deep focus.”

It was late when the car dropped Kaia and me at the Greenwich Hotel in Tribeca, and we sat on a couch in the quiet, private back garden lit by candlelight. After the experience of watching the play together, after expelling our mutual anxiety about the impending presidential election, we returned to the subject of acting. She had wanted to be an actor since she was a small child, and she became serious about pursuing it about six years ago. She told me that she first studied at the Terry Knickerbocker conservatory in Brooklyn and now works with Julia Crockett, her movement instructor, whom she met through Sarah Paulson. “Acting is a way for me to be an eternal student,” she said, adding that she’s grateful that modeling allows her the “luxury” of studying with multiple coaches. She’s aware that many actors are not in that position. “So it is such a privileged thing, but I have fallen back in love with modeling because of it.” Also, because she has been modeling long enough, she gets to work with people she loves. She has roles coming in interesting-sounding projects—the film Mother Mary directed by David Lowery, and a comedy series from Benito Skinner called Overcompensating—and she spoke excitedly about her first professional theatrical role, a lead part in a production of Evanston Salt Costs Climbing, a play by Will Arbery, which will open in January at a small theater in LA. When she read it, she thought, “No one would ever cast me in this. They would never. But I feel so connected to her”—her role, Jane Jr.—“and it’s sad to me that no one would ever see me as this girl I have so much in common with.”

“What is she like?”

“A Midwestern girl struggling with so much anxiety and so many dark thoughts…. She’s an obsessive personality, obsessed with natural disasters, with numbers, with the correct pronunciation of things.” When I read the play, I could easily imagine Kaia playing this smart, sensitive girl who wants to figure out the world. Over Zoom, Arbery said this about Kaia: “For someone whose job is to be looked at, she’s actually looking back much more than anybody realizes.” I too had noticed that Kaia listens carefully, and during our time together asked me almost as many questions as I asked her. She’s genuinely curious, but I also think it is a strategy to deflect attention. And she does get a lot of attention. She has mixed feelings about living a public and private life. And about social media, which she often removes from her phone. Most of us have some ambivalence about social media, but few of us, like Kaia, have 10 million followers on Instagram. I mentioned to her that I thought she handled her account very well (more of that curation). It was a mix of self-promotion (modeling campaigns and movie roles) and Library Science: books on shelves, books being read, and clips of her interviewing authors. She is good at Instagram wit. There is a recent post that consisted of two consecutive photos: the first was Kaia in a black string bikini sunbathing on a dock. Her face is obscured by the book she is reading: Dear Dickhead. The next photo is a page from the book with this section highlighted: “At this point, your sheer dumbfuckery commands a certain respect. But it doesn’t change the basics: I don’t give a shit about you. All my love to your sister, she was a wonderful friend.” Her comment under the photos is “a book for someone I used to know.”

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Kaia manages to avoid trolls by only letting her friends comment on her posts. And sure enough, Marc Jacobs—no slouch at a good IG joke himself—added multiple heart emojis under Kaia’s post. Other friends emoji-ed it as well. But the trolls found a way to comment nonetheless.

“I thought it was quite funny and cheeky. But then what was annoying is immediately it’s uncool because it’s on a gossip website: Who is she talking about? I thought, Funny. Cool. You ruined my joke,” Kaia said. The post wasn’t directed at any specific person or ex.

Later, when I got back to my hotel room, I found two gossip sites that had reported on the post. Each determined it was a different ex. (It turns out many men have sisters.) And the attention did kind of ruin the joke. Kaia said she mostly avoids looking at gossip. If someone tries to tell her what is being said about her online, she tells them she doesn’t want to know, which seems like a good strategy. She learned from her parents not to hide or change your life to avoid attention. The challenge is to accept and play with the attention but don’t let it control you. You control it.

This reminded me of something she told me at the Greenwich. She has a Julian Wasser photo of Joan Didion hanging over a banquette in her kitchen. Didion is one of Kaia’s many heroes. She’s read everything Didion has written and quotes her easily. The photo is the one where Didion is holding a cigarette and looks aware of the power of her own beauty. Kaia told me she loved that Didion was simultaneously able to be an intellectual and be aware of “how other people saw her.” It was so “dated,” she said, the clichéd ideas of what a smart woman should look like. It did seem amazing to me that a woman of Kaia’s generation still felt these pressures, and it reminded me that for all the gratitude Kaia feels for modeling, that isn’t the whole story. If you look closely, the surface reveals what is underneath. Literally. Kaia, I’d noticed, has a number of faint, subtle tattoos on her body. One is “never rush,” which is from a photo book of the classic ’80s Wim Wenders film Paris, Texas—an image of Wenders and Sam Shepard in front of a sign that says “never rush.” The other tattoo says “i know,” with both words crossed out. This refers to a Tracey Emin neon work that consists of the words I know I know I know (the middle I know is crossed out). Kaia said it was a reminder to listen, that sometimes we get caught up in our convictions about what we think we know and forget to be open. On Kaia’s body, it also seems outward facing: We think we understand what this beautiful body signifies, but maybe we don’t know, not all of it.

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The next night I was invited to a Library Science event at the Hotel Chelsea. The setting was particularly relevant, as Kaia and I had been discussing one of her favorite books, Just Kids, Patti Smith’s memoir of New York in the early ’70s. This was the place Smith found a community of artists, a place where you could pay your rent, or part of it, with a painting or a poem. A life of material poverty but artistic plenitude. The Chelsea has been renovated into a luxury hotel. It still has the same restaurant with the same funky bar and the same art on the walls, but everything has been cleaned up and rooms that night were going for $800. Bars and event rooms were filled with young, beautiful people. I found the room with the Library Science event and took a seat on a plush velvet couch at the very back. Kaia got up to speak. She looked bohemian but polished in a layered lace top and a dramatic, spangled gold necklace. I could feel the room shift toward her uncanny loveliness (how, I wonder, is she so tall and yet so delicate?). But when she spoke, she was disarmingly self-effacing and only said a few words before introducing Alex Auder, Viva’s daughter who had written a memoir, Don’t Call Me Home, about growing up at the Chelsea in its heyday. Auder acknowledged the elephantine irony in the room: When her book first came out, she thought it might be nice to give a reading in one of the event spaces at the Chelsea. But it didn’t happen because the hotel wanted $10,000, and, well, writing books does not pay well. Library Science’s clout now allowed Auder to finally do a reading there. And she was great, as were the other readers, who ranged from a longtime holdover resident, Man-Laï Liang, a producer of a new documentary about the hotel called Ghosts of the Chelsea Hotel; to an actor (and friend of Kaia’s), Fred Hechinger, who did a funny deadpan reading of Sam Shepard; to Kaia herself, who finished the event by reading the letter that Leonard Cohen wrote to Marianne Ihlen when she was dying, which was beautiful.

Afterward, the room felt transformed into a more welcoming space, despite the everlasting glamour of Kaia’s mother, Cindy Crawford, who was in attendance, and the numerous other beautiful people, including Jonah, in town from London. Let’s face it, a literary reading can be a dull and dutiful affair, and this had not been that. It even suggested that elusive thing, community: People communing over their love and interest in words and artists. Probably nothing can stop the way money has turned Manhattan into a rich person’s playground and pushed artistic seekers farther and farther into the boroughs of the city. But maybe you can throw a chic party and point people to things that deserve more attention and tribute. Maybe you can be a model and a bookworm, maybe you can be sweet and also fierce, and maybe you can have a public life and ignore the trolls. And maybe the kids are alright. The next morning, I googled Kaia and saw that she and her mother were photographed by paparazzi as they arrived at the Chelsea. Already, multiple fashion websites had analyzed what she was wearing. In the photos, she was Kaia the model, in the Celine glasses, aware of but impervious to the gaze of others.

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In this story: hair, Guido Palau; hair colorist, Lena Ott; makeup, Pat McGrath; manicurist, Jin Soon Choi; tailor, Lars Nord; produced by PRODn at Art + Commerce; set design, Mary Howard; backdrops courtesy of Hook Props. Special thanks to Highline Stages.

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