It's one thing to land the cover of Vogue magazine, the preeminent publication of the fashion world. It's wholly another to front the magazine's power issue alongside worldwide It girl and pop star Taylor Swift in celebration of feminine friendship.
Now supermodel and Webster Groves High School alumnus Karlie Kloss has accomplished both. Vogue released Friday the cover of its March issue, which features the blonde beauty best friends, and a video of the pair playing "The Best Best Friend Game," where they compete over who is the better bestie.
Kloss got her start at West County Center, where she auditioned for a charity fashion show at the age of thirteen.
"I had no clue," Kloss told Riverfront Times in 2008, when she was still a freshman at Webster Groves. "I didn't think you had to be tall. I didn't know there was such a thing as a runway walk. My mom and I went to the bathroom to practice walking so I wouldn't be nervous. Then, after I walked, I went to the food court and got a hot-fudge sundae."
See also: The It Girls: The Next Supermodel May Be Coming From a High School Near You
Little did Kloss know that talent agents Jeff and Mary Clarke, who scour St. Louis malls and supermarkets for modeling talent and discovered Ashton Kutcher, spotted her.
"We said to her, 'Don't change anything,'" Mary Clarke said to Riverfront Times.
Now her androgynous features and unique runway walk, once described by New York Magazine as "a kind of stoned death stare," have made this St. Louis native so famous that Vogue Paris named her one of the top 30 models of the 2000s.
Kloss met her BFF Swift backstage at a Victoria's Secret fashion show. Kloss is a Victoria's Secret Angel, and Swift was performing onstage.
"We were just like, 'You. My friend. Now,'" Swift tells Vogue about meeting Kloss in 2013.
After living in St. Louis, Kloss' family has zero tolerance for the model's "New York attitude," Kloss and Swift tell Vogue.
"They're like, 'You with your shoe pants, you leave those outside! You put on some real pants!'" Swift says.
Kloss was recently accepted to New York university's Gallatin School of Individualized Study and dates Joshua Kushner, an early investor in Instagram and cofounder of the health-care startup Oscar, according to Vogue.
This is Kloss' second Vogue cover in the last year. She was also on the cover of the magazine's all-important September issue with two other supermodels, Cara Delevingne and Joan Smalls.
Watch Kloss and Swift square off in "The Best Best Friend Game" here: Follow Lindsay Toler on Twitter at @StLouisLindsay. E-mail the author at [email protected].
