
She waits patiently for a panting Milo to finish a round of sniffs with a nervous Chihuahua named Kyle (“Hi, Kyle! Look, Milo, he’s just like you!”) and then continues. “One thing I learned is that I have to let go of my need to be a straight-A student across every aspect of my life,” Gerber says. My husband, who has a great perspective, always tells me, ‘Cindy, this too shall pass.’ ” But you just have to let your kids fly and be there to pick them up if they fall. “And a little later, it hit us in ways we didn’t necessarily expect. “So many people have difficult teen years with their kids, and we thought we’d kind of skated through that period,” Crawford tells me. Presley, too, attracted increasing tabloid attention after he was arrested for a DUI at the end of 2018, and later got a face tattoo under his eye that read, misunderstood.

If you’re inclined to believe the gossip sites, Davidson reportedly entered treatment around the time he and Gerber broke up. In the fall of 2019, soon after she turned 18, it was reported that she was dating Pete Davidson, the then-26-year-old, heavily tattooed Saturday Night Live comedian and actor who has gained a reputation as a troubled lothario. Gerber is palpably guarded talking about all this and is hard-pressed to go into further specifics, and who could blame her? The last couple of years have seen the public interest in her and her family roar to a crescendo. That’s what real growing up means, not being afraid to ask.”

And being able to ask for that help was amazing. And I got put in situations where one day I’d wake up and be like, How did I get here? I have no idea what I’m doing, and I need help. And so I tended to date older people because those were the people I was around. I had never had a high school sweetheart or anything. “You know, I was doing fashion month, but I was so young I had kissed, like, only one person.
Beach life tattoos driver#
“Or, I remember, when I started traveling alone, in Paris, my driver had to check me into my hotel room-I couldn’t even do it on my own.” When I wonder if she is also talking about matters of emotional maturity, she pauses again.
Beach life tattoos how to#
“It could be something as small as knowing how to take the bus from the flight to the terminal,” she finally says. (“Yeah, bud, I know! It’s really exciting,” she murmurs.) “And I found myself in situations where I was, like, I actually don’t have the life experience that I need to handle this.” When I ask her what she means, she thinks for a moment. “My dad would call me when I’d be in Paris and be like, ‘Do you want to come home?’ At the time I thought I was fine, but now I look back to 16-year-old Kaia and I’m like, ‘Come home!’ ” She pauses, the gravel crunching underneath our feet, the eager Milo straining at his leash. Gerber is quick to insist that even as a young teen, she was the driving force behind her career. “I always wanted to be good and easy, not to make trouble,” she says, “but when you do that, you sometimes end up losing your voice.” Who is Kaia Gerber, really? With a smile or a glance, a well-placed word or a keen observation, she will signal that she is thinking hard about that very question-and beginning to come up with some answers. On the gorgeous early-spring day when she and I meet at the reservoir at the foot of the Hollywood Hills, which we are set to loop around, accompanied by Gerber’s enthusiastic rescue mix Milo, her manner is preternaturally poised, that of a remarkably tall and beautiful child who has learned early in life how to talk to adults. At only 19, Gerber is one of the most successful models in the world and so, to many, a highly controlled, highly burnished product sold to millions on Instagram and beyond.

“For a long time, I thought my face and my body had more to say than I did, because that’s what people thought of me,” Kaia Gerber says.
