Karlie Elizabeth Kloss was born on August 3, 1992, in Chicago, Illinois, and raised in Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri. Her father, Kurt Kloss, worked as an emergency room physician, and her mother, Tracy Kloss, was a freelance art director. Karlie has three younger sisters. As a child she trained seriously in competitive ballet, a discipline she has since credited with the posture and stage presence that carried into her modeling career.

She was discovered at age 13 at a modeling contest at the West County Center mall in Des Peres, Missouri, by Jeff and Mary Clarke of Mother Model Management, a local St. Louis agency. Kloss did not win the contest, but the Clarkes were struck by her walk and signed her; within about a year she was placed with Elite Model Management, first in Chicago and then in New York, according to The Fashion Spot’s account of Mother Model Management’s scouting history. She began commuting to New York for shows while still in high school and finished her diploma through homeschooling as her career accelerated.

Kloss’s breakout came during New York Fashion Week in the mid-2000s, where she quickly moved from opening local shows to walking for major houses including Calvin Klein and Marc Jacobs. Her tall, athletic runway walk and versatility across editorial and commercial work made her one of the most rebooked models of her cohort through the late 2000s, with regular appearances in Vogue and other major fashion titles.

Kloss first walked in the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show in 2011 and was formally named a Victoria’s Secret Angel in 2013, a title that came with an exclusive contract and top billing in the brand’s televised show and campaigns. She held Angel status through the 2015 show, after which she stepped back from the Victoria’s Secret lineup as her broader campaign and business work expanded, a shift covered by outlets including the South China Morning Post’s retrospective on the wealthiest Victoria’s Secret Angels.

Through the 2010s Kloss became a fixture of major ad campaigns and magazine covers, amassing more than 40 Vogue covers worldwide, per Celebrity Net Worth’s career summary. She appeared repeatedly on Forbes’ closely watched ranking of the world’s highest-paid models, including its 2014 list and its 2018 list, where she placed second among all working models.

In parallel with modeling, Kloss began building a technology and education profile. In 2015 she founded Kode With Klossy, a nonprofit offering free coding camps for teenage girls, which grew into a national program covered extensively in the press, including the Good Morning America / ABC News feature on the camps’ growth and a 2017 Forbes cover story dubbing her “coding’s supermodel.”

Kloss took on television work as well, joining Bravo’s rebooted “Project Runway” as host and permanent judge starting with its 2019 season, replacing longtime host Heidi Klum, as reported by The Hollywood Reporter. She stepped back to guest appearances starting with the show’s 2021 season as her media and investment ventures expanded, per Distractify’s coverage of her reduced hosting role.

Kloss’s most significant recent pivot has been into media ownership. In 2023 she and husband Joshua Kushner formed Bedford Media, a holding company built around reviving legacy publishing brands, and used it to acquire British fashion title i-D Magazine from Vice Media Group, a deal detailed by the Business of Fashion. In 2024 Bedford struck a deal with Dotdash Meredith to relaunch LIFE Magazine in print and digital form, with Kloss driving editorial and brand strategy, as covered by Variety, and as of mid-2026 the couple’s broader ambitions for reviving print titles were profiled by Bloomberg. We have not found any independently verifiable entity called “Life Story Ventures”; Bedford Media is the confirmed, named vehicle behind Kloss’s magazine acquisitions and is what this profile treats as her media holding company.

Forbes tracked Kloss’s earnings closely during her peak modeling years. She debuted on Forbes’ highest-paid models list in the mid-2010s and by its 2018 ranking had climbed to number two worldwide, with Celebrity Net Worth citing Forbes’ figure of roughly $13-14 million in trailing 12-month earnings for that cycle, driven by a heavy campaign and endorsement schedule.

Kloss’s income mix has diversified substantially since her peak Victoria’s Secret years: modeling and campaign fees remain a contributor, but television hosting fees, brand consulting, Bedford Media’s operating revenue, and her angel-investing activity now all factor into her overall annual income. None of these more recent, business-side income streams have individually disclosed dollar figures in public reporting, so this section is necessarily anchored to the Forbes-tracked modeling-era numbers, which are the only earnings figures independently verified at the time of writing.

Kloss’s highest-profile modeling contract was her Victoria’s Secret Angel deal, running from her 2013 naming through the 2015 show; the specific dollar value of that contract has never been publicly disclosed by the brand, unlike some of her Angel predecessors’ deals. She also held a long-running exclusive beauty contract with Estee Lauder, described by WWD as going “deeper than a typical partnership,” spanning campaign work, product collaboration and brand appearances rather than a simple appearance fee.

Additional campaign contracts across her career included Adidas, Swarovski, L’Oreal Paris, Jean Paul Gaultier, Nike, and Donna Karan, per Celebrity Net Worth’s brand roundup. As with most modeling contracts, the specific fee structures of these individual deals were not made public by the brands involved, so no further per-contract figures can be responsibly cited here.

Beyond her core modeling contracts, Kloss has been a recurring face for beauty and lifestyle brands, and reporting indicates she has periodically redirected a share of endorsement income from partners such as Adidas, Swarovski and Express toward funding Kode With Klossy’s coding camps rather than treating all of it as personal income.

Her most recent notable brand relationship has been as an investor and public face for wellness-technology brand Therabody, a step beyond a standard paid endorsement and into an equity-linked advisory role, as profiled by Forbes’ 2022 feature on her wellness and tech investing. As with her modeling contracts, exact dollar terms of these newer brand and equity arrangements have not been publicly disclosed.

Kode With Klossy, founded in 2015, is structured as a nonprofit organization, not a personal for-profit business; Kloss has personally contributed to it (reportedly into seven figures cumulatively) and has redirected portions of brand deals to fund it, but its budget and any grant funding it receives should not be counted toward her personal net worth. It remains her best-known venture and has expanded into a national scholarship and camp program for teenage girls and gender-expansive teens interested in software engineering.

Her for-profit business activity centers on Bedford Media, the holding company she co-founded with Joshua Kushner in 2023, which owns i-D Magazine and holds the operating rights to relaunch LIFE Magazine. Bedford is privately held and has not disclosed revenue or valuation figures. Kloss is also an active angel investor; investment-data platforms including PitchBook’s investor profile for Kloss and industry trackers describe more than a dozen fashion, wellness and consumer-technology investments, typically at seed stage, though individual check sizes and current valuations are not public. She was also part of an investor group that acquired a stake in W Magazine in 2020, per Celebrity Net Worth’s career summary cited above.

Kloss’s husband, Joshua Kushner, is the founder of venture capital firm Thrive Capital and is separately reported by Forbes to be a multibillionaire on the strength of that firm’s stakes in companies such as Instagram, Stripe and OpenAI. His fortune is his own and is tracked separately by Forbes; it is not merged into the personal net worth estimate for Kloss in this profile.

Kloss and Kushner have been active real estate buyers over the past decade. In December 2020 they purchased a waterfront mansion on North Bay Road in Miami Beach, reported at roughly $21.5 million by American Luxury and other outlets covering the sale, with some later coverage citing a $23.5 million figure for the same property — the discrepancy likely reflects reported list price versus final recorded sale price, and we have not been able to independently reconcile the exact closing figure.

In 2021 the couple went into contract on a penthouse at Manhattan’s Puck Building, last listed at $42.5 million; the final sale price was not publicly disclosed, per 6sqft’s reporting on the purchase. In 2024 they bought the architecturally significant “Wave House” in Malibu, California — a Harry Gesner-designed home previously owned by Rod Stewart — for a reported $29.5 million, as covered by multiple real estate outlets that year.

Kloss has also sold prior New York properties as the couple consolidated their holdings, including a West Village townhouse co-op sold for about $2.4 million, per 6sqft’s coverage of that sale, and a Nolita apartment reported sold for $6.6 million. Because most of this real estate was purchased jointly with Kushner and typically titled to entities associated with the couple rather than to Kloss individually, these properties should be read as household assets rather than solely her own; no reliable public source breaks out what share, if any, is attributed to Kloss individually.