Beauty vloggers, PewDiePie: Make room. Supermodel Karlie Kloss is now a YouTuber, and if her 2.9 million Instagram followers are any indication, Klossy — as her channel is called — could launch a new video star.
Kloss, the blonde 6-foot-1 runway model and former Victoria’s Secret Angel, seems to have boundless energy and even more ideas. She is featured in glossy print campaigns for Kate Spade, Versace and L’Oreal, among others, and the impressive look and drive of her Spinnerific body in motion is the subject of a rhapsodic article and photo spread in the August issue of Self magazine.
But she’s clearly got more than fashion and fitness on her mind. The 22-year-old also recently started Karlie’s Kookies, a vegan cookie-baking business for charity. She’ll attend New York University in the autumn. And she’s become so fascinated with computer coding that she launched a “Kode with Karlie” summer scholarship to get more young women to study coding.
Clearly, Kloss is a model with a voice. Now she’s taking it to a global platform. Last week, she launched her YouTube channel with a brief, punchy trailer.
You might recognise the moving-scrapbook style of filmmaker and video artist Casey Neistat, who’s been advising her. Kloss, known for her disarmingly friendly personality, has a knack for high-powered friendships. (Her BFF Taylor Swift tops the list.) Neistat is a hero of the video-sharing world, having shot to fame in 2003, early in online-video history, with his three-minute “iPod’s Dirty Secret” film. In it he skewered Apple for not using replaceable batteries. He has gone on to HBO series, films, and his own popular YouTube channel.
Neistat met Kloss at a movie screening “and we became fast friends”, he said in a recent phone interview. For her YouTube channel, Kloss is also working with two young filmmakers, Annalora von Pentz and Ruby Honerkamp. “My role is giving creative oversight and lending my understanding of online video to their creation,” Neistat said.
More gorgeous than glamorous
In the YouTube community, “there’s an understood trust between the content creator and the viewer”, he said. Teenage viewers are attracted to the unfiltered approachability and authenticity of YouTube stars, and have little interest in micromanaged Hollywood-style slickness. The most important advice Neistat had for Kloss is: “Be yourself and be honest. Online viewers have a real nose for anything that feels artificial and contrived.” Honesty on video comes naturally to Kloss, he added, one benefit of living so much of her life in front of the camera.
So far Kloss has posted two more videos on her channel. The most recent landed on Tuesday afternoon, in which she settles in on her sofa in a comfy T-shirt, looking gorgeous but not very glamorous, and chummily answers questions from her Twitter followers (#QuestionsForKarlie). She’s obsessed with House of Cards, we learn; she loves cheese and listens to Beyonce’s Run the World (Girls) while working out. (You were expecting something by Swift? Maybe for her cool-down ...)
She’s fun to hang out with. That’s the real secret. Kloss comes across as open, real and welcoming. There’s a graciousness to her approach that you can feel. More than the glimpses of fashion shoots and the witty filmmaking, it’s that warm and inviting quality that she has — her grace — that draws you in.
She understands that her fans don’t want glitzy scenarios or a perfected presentation. They want connection. That’s what Kloss offers, whether she’s walking the runway or speaking to the videocamera: She is fully present and aware, taking it all in, and she’s at ease. In her video, when a flub happens, if she bungles a word or sends her ring flying across the room, she laughs it off without embarrassment. She conveys a refreshing, honest enthusiasm for the moment.
Also in this video, she says she hopes to have “many more” careers. Finding her voice on YouTube may be just a stepping stone. There’s no reason to think Kloss will stop here.
