It seems incomprehensible that the 26-year-old, who is considered one of the top models on the planet, could have been passed over for jobs. But in an interview with Vogue, Kloss revealed that it happened and it was related to weight gain.
“I started taking birth control, and my body became more womanly – hips and thighs appeared,” the 26-year-old Victoria’s Secret model and entrepreneur said in the interview. “I started losing jobs; I wasn’t getting booked for the runway; designers stopped working with me. It felt as if my world had been turned upside down.”
The model had gone from a “size zero to a size four-to-six over the course of a year” – which is still tiny, especially considering Kloss is over six foot tall.
At that point Kloss had been working in the industry for nearly a decade, since she was 15, and while it was crushing for the 26-year-old to be missing out on jobs after building such a successful modeling career, the situation provided the perfect opportunity for the model to reassess what she wanted from life.
Kloss took some coding classes and from there has become a leader in championing girls to get involved with tech, specifically coding, founding a scholarship program, Kode with Klossy, for young girls interested in computer science.
So, even though Kloss’s story casts the modeling industry in a terrible light, two positive outcomes resulted from it: Kloss found a new direction and in the process, became a trailblazing role model for girls keen to get into the tech world.
