In a new wide-ranging interview with British Vogue, in which Kylie Jenner is the first KarJenner to grace its cover, the multi hyphenate model and makeup mogul discusses everything from her friendship with Stassie, her relationship to the wild world of personal aesthetics, and the lasting impacts of motherhood.
Jenner was a teenager, 19, when she became pregnant with her first child. “Looking back at it, I give myself more empathy and grace. But when I was a teenager, even my family were like, ‘You aren’t that young.’ I think maybe I carried myself [a certain way] or I’d already been working for 10 years. It didn’t hit me [straight away]. But it was a huge life change,” Jenner told British Vogue.
A prolonged postpartum depression followed after both of her children’s births, Stormi’s lasting about a year and Aire’s around the same length of time. The effects were massive, and in her mid-twenties is only now recalibrating her life and self image. “I’m going to be 27, and I’m finally feeling like myself again, and [looking back] I think, being pregnant, I wore sweatpants every day, I didn’t have time to figure out even some of the little things in my life, and then postpartum lasted a year. Mentally, it’s really hard. Hormonally, it’s really hard. I didn’t know how to dress,” she said.
She described each instance of postpartum depression impacting her in different ways: after Aire’s birth, experiencing “major baby blues.”
“I was just so emotional over things that I probably wouldn’t be that emotional about [typically]. On the phone with my mom all day hysterically crying, saying, ‘I can’t figure out his name’...I felt like such a failure that I couldn’t name him. He deserved so much more than that. It just really triggered me.”
Her decision to become a young mother with rapper Travis Scott, father to both Stormi and Aire, dramatically changed her life both online and off. “No matter what I’m going through or what I look like or what the internet writes about me that day, I come home and my kids just love me unconditionally. They’re just obsessed with me and that’s taught me to walk through life a little easier. I’m like, ‘OK, well I have these little humans at home that need me and love me and think I’m the most perfect person in the world, so I don’t really need validation from outside sources.’”
Still, navigating family life as a teen, and finding balance while growing up together with kids. “I have to remind my friends who don’t have kids all the time…that I have children. Letting go of your selfishness and your freedom at a very young age.”
And when you're someone as megafamous as Kylie Jenner, he relentlessness of public body shaming only compounds matters. “I feel like people didn’t give me, or give women in general, enough empathy. I see pictures [online] and people are accusing me of being on drugs or something…I’m back at my weight I was before I had my daughter and son and people are putting side by sides of me three months postpartum. I’m like: ‘Does everyone forget that I had two children and I gained 60 pounds both pregnancies?’”
