Karlie Kloss was all about saving money as a young model.
“I am such a frugal girl, like, still to this day,” Kloss, 32, quipped on the Thursday, July 10, episode of “The Burnouts” podcast. “I don’t care how much success or money that I ever [have]. I want a bargain. I want a deal. I want to make sure that I’m buying [products] as smart as possible. I was always saving every dollar I made.”
Kloss, a Missouri native who was discovered in high school, also tried to save money when she traveled to modeling gigs.
“I was always flying economy class. A client would pay for me to sit in business class,” she recalled. “I would call the airline, literally downgrade myself [and] collect the difference in airfare, which would be thousands and thousands of dollars.”
Kloss added, “They would send me a voucher in the mail for, like, $10,000, but I would still upgrade with my miles back to my first-class seat. I was still sitting in the same seat, but I collected all the cash. I don’t know if they let you do that anymore, but then I would fly my entire family on vacation around the world with these credits.”
Since those early days, Kloss has become a bona fide supermodel, walking for major designers and booking campaigns with well-known brands.
“I always saw my career in fashion as a bit of a means to an end,” she said. “It was a way to make unbelievable money as a young, uneducated person. I hadn’t gone to grad school, and I just had this unbelievable access to an opportunity and I ran for it. For me, it was sort of a job that I feel like happened to me.”
Kloss eventually leveraged her platform into building Kode With Klossy, a STEM camp to teach young girls how to code.
“Modeling was, sort of, my wedge into the rest of the world,” she stated. “From the very beginning, I always thought, ‘This is incredible.’ It happened to me. I wasn’t somebody who was banging down doors with my portfolio. … It happened so quickly and so overnight that I was just trying to keep up.”
According to Kloss, she only wanted to pursue modeling “as long as it’s fun.”
“I could see very quickly, even though I was 15 years old, there were a lot of complicated factors to the industry,” Kloss recalled. “There were a lot of people who weren’t happy and not enjoying it. I was like, ‘This is an amazing creative world that I love and I want to experience it, learn all that I can,’ and I did. It was a fly on the wall.”
At the same time, Kloss was always aware that she was booked for “a job.”
“It was something I was doing,” she added. “I didn’t feel, like, it was who I was.”
