Kaia Gerber is seated in a sunny corner of her Los Angeles home, flanked by bookcases. It’s a rare week off for the 24-year-old model and actor, who is currently in production on Ryan Murphy’s adaptation of The Shards, Bret Easton Ellis’s coming-of-age thriller. All she has on her slate for the day, she tells me, is therapy, though she’ll admit later that our conversation “felt like it satiated a lot of that.”
Gerber is almost startlingly forthcoming about her childhood (perhaps a product of said therapy), which she describes as “pretty isolated,” but “in a really great way,” and “as normal as it could have been.” She continues, “I always went to public school. I did theater. I did every community play. I was in choir. I did singing recitals. I danced.” Whenever her family visited New York, Gerber would insist that they attend Broadway shows. “I saw Wicked eight times. I had all the lyrics to Rent memorized by the time I was nine years old.”
“Book heavy” is how she refers to her upbringing, which she credits to her mom. Gerber would trail along, reading whatever was assigned to her older brother, Presley, in school: books by Ray Bradbury, Of Mice and Men, and so on. Today she prefers the works of Izumi Suzuki and Marguerite Duras and has found her people through Library Science, her anti-bestseller book club, which hosts author talks and produces cheeky merch like T-shirts emblazoned with a line from the 1970 Éric Rohmer film Claire’s Knee: “Come to my house I have great books.”
Gerber’s childhood, of course, was anything but normal. If books were prominent, so, too, were naked photos of her mom, the supermodel and mogul Cindy Crawford, which lined the walls. “They were, to me, artistic,” she says. “It wasn’t vulgar; it wasn’t objectification.” In fact, Gerber describes it as “a gift to grow up in a house that was without shame for the female body.”
Rande Gerber, her father, is a wildly successful businessman and a cofounder (along with George Clooney) of Casamigos tequila. Gerber’s close-knit family’s then-cliff-top estate was located in Malibu’s Encinal Bluffs area, known for its sea caves, sea lions, and exclusive properties on multi-acre lots.
“It’s so interesting to articulate your own childhood, because I have a brother who’s two years older, and our memories are completely contradictory, which is really fascinating and I think has taught me so much about how multiple realities can exist at once,” Gerber tells me.
Much of Gerber’s young adulthood has been spent navigating multiple realities. In her world, attention is both a currency and an inheritance. She is someone who, for her job, is a surface onto which others project meaning. But expectations have had a way of hardening quickly around her: about who she is, about what she can do, about how seamlessly she will fulfill a role that others often assume has already been established for her. What she’s reckoning with now, a decade into her career, is a careful recalibration of figuring out how much of herself to withhold, how much to offer, and how to transform being seen from a condition that has been thrust upon her into one she actively authors.
Gerber often adjusts her thoughts with a postscript of sensitive insights, a habit she and others attribute to her “old soul” personality. “People think this is her first life, and it definitely is not,” affirms Alyssa Reeder, the other half of Library Science, which counts among its otherwise niche crowd of Duras disciples recent Instagram followers Tom Brady and Monica Lewinsky. “Also, I don’t think people realize that she’s in on the joke,” says Reeder. “She knows very well—as maybe a lot of young women do—that allowing people to underestimate you can be very powerful.”
When I ask Gerber if she can pinpoint a moment when her childhood ended, she zeroes in on age 15. That’s when she started to be homeschooled to accommodate her nascent modeling career—a career that seems ordained, considering her inside track and inherited bone structure. Still, her mom was never coddling. “She doesn’t give out advice unless you ask. But if you ask, get ready, because she’ll be very honest in ways that, sometimes, it’s hard to hear,” Gerber says. “She’s usually right, which is infuriating, but she’s also very willing to let me make a mistake that she made 30 years ago.”
Gerber was only 10 years old when Donatella Versace handpicked her to appear in the inaugural campaign for Versace’s childrenswear, photographed by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott. She was a second-generation “super” in the making, walking in Crawford’s footsteps, wearing kid-size gladiator sandals.
“I had all these adults, not only my parents, looking at me and being like, ‘What should we all do now?’ ” Gerber says. “I couldn’t decide I wasn’t in the mood that day.” Although she concedes it’s in her nature to be dependable, she is finally affording herself more grace and leeway. “I was still so young. I was masking as an adult. Now that I’m more secure in my adulthood, I’m willing to show up messy and be kind of childish about certain things.”
It wasn’t long before Gerber assumed her (runway) form. By the time she was 16, she was a fixture at her first Fashion Month, walking for Raf Simons’s neo-Western Calvin Klein and for Chanel, Miu Miu, Off-White, Saint Laurent, and Valentino, to name a few. Gerber transforms into each brand’s image: Chloé’s boho principles, Prada’s handsome utility, Moschino’s glossy commentary. (Gerber was feted in the latter as a literal bouquet of flowers.) “I’m quite happy to be a vessel. It’s not lost on me that part of my job is just being what people want me to be and being a canvas or mirror for people to reflect their own ideas onto.” A line from Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, a favorite of Gerber’s, spoken by the unnamed narrator, comes to mind: “I can become anything anyone wants me to be. And believe it. … And when I believe it, and it becomes true for anyone seeing me who wants me to be according to his taste, I know that too.”
Being looked at, or at least the recognition of one’s power to attract scrutiny, is a shift that most girls encounter at some point. For Gerber, this audit was premature, due to her twin resemblance with Crawford and the fashion industry’s documentation of it. She was obliged to navigate this attention acutely while posing for it professionally.
In her fashion work, the gaze has mostly been male. She says she learned a lot from Steven Meisel, who famously places a mirror in front of his models to aid with awareness. Gerber credits Meisel with teaching her to relax her otherwise stiffened hands, habitually in the shape of a claw. Gerber’s modeling evolution is clear in a quick look at her campaigns, going from beachy muse for Daisy Love by Marc Jacobs to Hedi Slimane’s rock hybrid of Paris-L.A. iconography (and a sporty Pilates offshoot) to a very Cindy homage staged at the artist Sterling Ruby’s studio for Pieter Mulier’s Alaïa.
It wasn’t until Gerber’s longstanding friendship turned collaboration with Sarah Burton, and the designer’s revival of Givenchy’s codes, that the perspective shifted. In a Fall 2025 campaign directed by and costarring Babygirl’s Halina Reijn, Gerber and the Dutch director play “actress” and “director.” They run lines and block a scene. Gerber wears a red mini pencil dress in counterpoint to a smart pair of loafers. The combination reflects Gerber’s unfussy personal style: a mix of clean lines, American prep, and pretty touches like camisoles, cardigans, and ballet flats.
Under Burton’s watch, Gerber’s red-carpet silhouettes attest to her multihyphenate moment with details that exude romance, strength, and, thankfully, some play. At last fall’s Academy Museum Gala, Gerber wore a custom Lyon-lace cape-back dress that called to mind the original Givenchy muse, Audrey Hepburn. “Timeless and modern, completely embodying Kaia” is how Burton describes the garment. “She was very much part of the creative process when making the dress. I always find things come alive when we’re in the room together.”
Owing in part to some of her high-profile relationships, Gerber is frequently chronicled by paparazzi, either as she walks her dog, Milo, when she’s on her way to the gym, or when she’s accompanied by a boyfriend. I ask Gerber if she considers herself a romantic person. “I would say I romanticize,” she says. “I don’t know if I’m romantic. I’m a daydreamer. I play out every scenario in my head. I can kind of convince myself that someone is anything that I want, even if they do everything to prove that they’re not. My imagination is really strong, and it’s been such a gift in my work. Not always a gift in relationships.”
Her attitude to her personal life’s public access is both refreshing and realistic. A common refrain in interviews is how Gerber is misunderstood. She admits she is partly accountable for this chronic theme and explains it as a manner of self-preservation. “The fact that I constantly talk about it means I have an issue with it,” she says. “I don’t think it’s something that will ever be conquered, and I’m coming to terms with that. Sometimes it’s easier to know that the projection that you are making of yourself onto the world isn’t the entire you.”
Acting has provided Gerber with a sense of generative dissonance; it’s both a release and an opportunity to regain control. She credits her theater work, most recently a role in Will Arbery’s Evanston Salt Costs Climbing at the Rogue Machine Theatre in Los Angeles, with being a safe, auspicious space for her to navigate and, more critically, escape into character. “I love theater because it is immortalized in people’s memories but not immortalized in … media. So much of what I’ve done—every photo—is immortalized on the internet. It gets taken from me. The wonderful thing about theater is kind of how I feel about my childhood. I had my experience, and the people watching had their experience. I can’t go back and watch from the audience. I can only experience it from where I stood.”
Theater as a showground for exploring the full-blown impact of her emotional edges has also helped Gerber access something else. Gerber admits that prior to her stage work, she’d always wanted to be seen as “the easy one.” I ask her what she means. “Someone who doesn’t need attention, like, an ‘Oh, we don’t worry about her’ kind of person. But I’ve recently realized that it actually prevents people from feeling genuinely close to you if you’re not sharing your vulnerabilities with them.” Gerber confesses she was likely attempting to prevent closeness. “I’m quite good at deflecting. I believe that power and dominance, a lot of the time, is attention, and I think I feel more powerful when my attention is on someone else.”
Gerber’s film and television projects—she is currently starring in the high-camp second season of Palm Royale opposite Kristen Wiig and Carol Burnett—vary widely and seem to mirror her tendency to blend a rigorous and interior art practice with the realities of her circumstance and the shared joke of how exposing it is to be a person in the world. Sometimes the roles are playfully referential, like Gerber’s portrayal of a trivialized cheerleader in Emma Seligman’s comedy Bottoms. Other times, the roles feel closer to those intrusive themes explored in the books she pores over. Gerber tells me the dark satirist Todd Solondz is a director she hopes to work with one day.
“A sponge” and “beyond her years” is how Burnett describes Gerber, who would often wait around the Palm Royale set, even if she wasn’t shooting a scene. “She didn’t just go and take a nap in her trailer. She was observing, always watching and learning, even camera setups. I wouldn’t be surprised if someday she might direct,” says Burnett, who was thrilled when Gerber attended her 92nd birthday party.
Up next, Gerber can be seen in filmmaker David Lowery’s twisted pop epic Mother Mary, opposite Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel. Lowery, who also collaborated with Gerber and Crawford on a few videos for Zara, echoes but amends the refrain that Gerber is an old soul. “Her energy on set is special,” he says. “She’s so mature that it is tempting to call her an old soul, but that’s not quite right. She has access to an old soul but just as often comes to the table with an almost giddy excitement at the prospect of uncovering something new.” Lowery recalls first meeting Gerber three years ago. “My chief memory of that conversation is of a cascade of unexpected cinephilia. You know that frisson you get when you meet someone who gets all your reference points and can complement them with touchstones of their own?” The pair talked about the work of Peter Greenaway, Sally Potter’s Orlando, and their shared admiration for the writer Carmen Maria Machado.
In one of the Givenchy campaign images conceived by Reijn, Gerber hovers above her director while wearing a caped lace mini bustier dress and gold shoes. It’s an image that evokes Duras’s The Lover yet again, specifically the gold lamé shoes the narrator wears in that striking opening scene and, more broadly, Duras’s radical portrayal of desire and the act of being observed. In some ways, Gerber was hardwired for a life of being looked at, raised by a mother and role model who received the world’s gaze on her own terms. Gerber’s own trajectory is proportioned, embracing what’s been predetermined for her while safeguarding her own pursuits. “I am a shape-shifter,” she says. “I let my identity be that I can transform, rather than what I transformed into.”
This article appears in the February issue of Harper’s Bazaar.
Opening image: Hoop earrings, Wempe.
Hair: Lucas Wilson for Bumble and Bumble; makeup: Aaron de Mey; manicure: Emi Kudo for Aprés; casting: Anita Bitton at the Establishment; production: Day Int.; set design: Whitney Hellesen
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