Karlie Kloss has spent a pretty significant portion of her life being called that girl. The model. The face. The long-legged apparition who appears in a photograph and suddenly everyone else in the room looks like they need to stand up straighter.
Now, ten years after she became the face of Carolina Herrera’s Good Girl fragrance, Kloss is revisiting the role for the Fall 2026 issue of V Magazine. The story is appropriately titled “Still That Girl,” although the accompanying conversation makes a convincing case that she is, perhaps inconveniently for anyone attempting to put her in a box, several other girls too.
Photographed by Rob Rusling and styled by Patti Wilson, the editorial goes all in on the drama. This is not Karlie pretending to be casual in a white T-shirt while leaning against a wall. Black dominates the story, showing up in veils, gloves, corseted silhouettes, and exaggerated shoulders. One look expands dramatically across the frame, while another pulls the body inward with a rigid, sculpted shape.
Basically, if subtlety walked into the room, it would be asked to leave.
The cover has its own bit of fashion-world mythology baked into it. Carolina Herrera’s Global Creative Director Wes Gordon created a custom black design specifically around a portrait of Herrera by Robert Mapplethorpe. So you have Kloss, Herrera, Gordon, and Mapplethorpe all meeting in one image, which is a lot of fashion history to ask one cover to carry. Naturally, it does.
But the more interesting part of the story happens away from the clothes.
Inside V Magazine, Kloss speaks with Kaia Gerber about identity and what it means to grow up while an industry is constantly trying to decide who you are. It’s a particularly relevant conversation for someone who has been professionally recognizable since she was young enough for the world to assume it knew what came next.
Kloss pushes back on that assumption.
“I am not one job title,” she says, rejecting the idea that a career, particularly one as visible as modeling, should become shorthand for an entire person.
It’s a useful distinction, especially in fashion, where people can spend years becoming famous for one very specific version of themselves and then have to practically file paperwork to convince everyone there are other versions available.
The images certainly don’t suggest a woman interested in shrinking herself down to one category. With hair by Akki Shirakawa and makeup by Kabuki, the editorial has the polished severity of a classic fashion story, but there is something more deliberate happening underneath all that black fabric and sculptural tailoring.
Ten years into Good Girl, Karlie Kloss is still recognizable.
But recognition, apparently, is not the same thing as definition.
