Kendall Jenner – Everything Under the Sun

To Kendall Jenner, mental health means many things: rest, reflection, riding, reading—and being open. She talks to Rob Haskell about a decade in modeling. Photographed by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott.

- By Rob Haskell. Photographs by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott

At first glance, there was nothing atypical about the photos Kendall Jenner shared following her New Year’s trip to Barbados: of string bikinis and gauzy dresses, palm trees in silhouette against sunsets, wine glasses clanking, fireworks popping. But if you were searching for a dissonant note, you might find it in the copy of The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s wrenching 2005 memoir of grief and loss, splayed on the green canvas of Jenner’s sun lounger.

“Somebody said, ‘Damn, that’s a beach read for you?!’ ” she recalls. “I would read a few pages on the sand, and then my friends would come out and they’d be like, ‘Take a shot!’”

A meditation on the peculiar tricks an imagination may play to avoid a goodbye surely chafed against the spirit of the party weekend. But such mental toggling is classic Kendall Jenner. The heavy stuff bubbles up to the point of overflowing, and that’s when friends and sisters and horses and other salves come to the rescue. “It’s kind of interesting that we’re wired to not think about death all the time,” Jenner muses.

“And yet we don’t know the concept of neverending. We can’t visualize a never-ending universe, but at the same time, nothing scares me more than the end of something. I’m so bad at goodbyes.” She catches herself and starts to laugh. What better defense against the dark than humor? “These are the thoughts that creep into my mind. I can’t let myself get too deep into them, or else I spiral.”