Kendall Jenner is in a privileged enough position that she can “choose” which modelling jobs she wants to take. Opening up about her decision to scale back her career, the 22-year-old’s comments have sparked an outcry from the modelling community.
“Since the beginning, we’ve been super selective about what shows I would do,” Kendall, who knocked Gisele Bundchen off the top of Forbes’ list of highest-earning models, told Love magazine.
Jenner continued, “I was never one of those girls who would do, like, 30 shows a season or whatever the f**k those girls do. More power to ’em.
“I had a million jobs, not only catwalks but everything else. The whole combination was very overwhelming and I started to freak out a little bit and needed to take a step back,” the Keeping Up With The Kardashians star added.
Over the weekend, the publication shared an image from their shoot with Kendall, posting a quote from the interview as the caption. The former Victoria’s Secret model’s peers took to the comments section to share their condemnation of Kendall’s words.
“This makes me so angry,” wrote Victoria’s Secret model Jac Jagaciak. “So disrespectful to literally 99% of people in the industry — yes, they had to work their way up. Please get in touch with the real world!”
While Sports Illustrated star Vita Sidorkina added, “Maybe ‘those girls’ need to pay their bills that’s why they are doing 30 shows? No words …”
And it didn’t end there, “whatever the f**k those girls do’ is do their very best to make their way up AND try to make some money so that they can provide for themselves and their families,” responded runway star Daria Strokous. “Oh, and it’s 70 shows a season by the way and we are all f**king proud of every single one of the girls that did it.”
Famous transgender model Teddy Quinlivan shared a longer reply via Instagram Story. “As models, we need to uplift each other,” she wrote. “If you are lucky as a model you might make enough to not be in debt to your agency; maybe even move out of the model apartment … Unfortunately, this isn’t the case for the vast majority of models who have to leave everything behind including their families in pursuit of a better life.”
She added: “Models don’t just come from Calabasas … they come from Somalia, the Siberian tundra, a rural village in China, a trailer park in Tennessee. Making disparaging comments about your peers don’t lead to growth or unity which our regulation-less industry desperately needs.”
Kendall has not yet responded to the comments from her peers however, this isn’t the first she caused controversy.
In 2017, she faced intense backlash over her Pepsi campaign, which was accused of appropriating the Black Lives Matter movement, the commercial was pulled down almost immediately.
This article originally appeared on InStyle Australia
