Karlie Kloss, the star model of the 2010s, is part of a group of investors who had already acquired W Magazine (an even more luxurious title than Vogue) and are now buying iD from the Vice Media group in financial difficulties.
After W magazine Repurchased at the end of 2020, Karlie Kloss saves ID card. This British title was founded in 1980 by Terry Jones and has remained iconic ever since, thanks largely to its covers featuring fashion and counterculture figures with only one visible eye. The star model of the 2010s has already been on the cover herself, and that’s exactly what she decided to post to confirm the news, more in a tongue-in-cheek than meta way.
Karlie Kloss buys iD magazine and becomes CEO
It is through her company Bedford Media that Karlie Kloss becomes CEO of iD, saving the title from the financial problems of Vice Media (owner group that filed for bankruptcy in May 2023), for an undisclosed amount, reports Matters of fashion.
The current editor-in-chief, Alastair McKimm, will remain so and will even take on responsibility as he will even become creative director and editor-in-chief of other international editions. A bit like the group Condé Nast is doing now with Anna Wintour directing all editions Fashion since 2020 for the sake of economy and consistency. Is Karlie Kloss preparing to become a media mogul, after being a star on the runways, advertising campaigns and magazine covers? Will her experience in modeling push her to give more power to models, who are increasingly deprived of their image, their faces and their bodies, at the dawn of the impending revolution in artificial intelligence?
When models ruled fashion
Maybe you’ve seen the documentary series The Supermodels on AppleTV+. Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford and Christy Turlington talk about their golden age as models on the catwalks, until they were replaced by a crowd of increasingly thin, younger and anonymous models. Mainly because designers started to get fed up with the fact that the media and especially the general public were more interested in these handful of supermodels than in them and their creations.
Since then, there are few models whose simple first name can conjure up a mental image. Among the most contemporary we can think of Gigi and Bella Hadid. And that’s certainly because they owe their initial fame not to the catwalks, but to reality TV, a sign of models’ loss of influence and power in the fashion economy. But one exception could change the rule: Karlie Kloss.
Who is Karlie Kloss anyway?
Born in 1992, this American top model and trained dancer signed her first agency contract in 2007 at the age of 15 and quickly became a hit. Between June 2013 and June 2014 Forbes estimated her annual income at $4 million, making her one of the highest-paid models of her generation. In 2015, Karlie Kloss launched her own YouTube channel and in 2016 her computer programming training for women, increasing her annual income to 10 million. So much so that she no longer has to parade or pose for advertising campaigns, with some particularly lucrative exceptions, to earn more than $13 million annually as of 2018.
That year, Karlie Kloss married Joshua Kushner. This American businessman and investor appears to be the son of real estate developer Charles Kushner and the brother of Jared Kushner (husband of Ivanka Trump), son-in-law of Donald Trump. Since then, the couple has raised two boys (Levi Joseph born in 2021, and Elijah Jude in 2023) and cultivates discretion. After years of seeing her image and the narrative of her life controlled by others, Karlie Kloss could very well want to turn the situation around by taking over as head of media in several positions. After very luxurious W magazineand now the sharpest ID card, will the Bedford Media group buy another title? And above all, will it change the face of fashion magazines?