Kaia Gerber had a brief dalliance with the bombshell archetype this week. The 23-year-old model posed on the red carpet at the Toronto International Film Festival in a Hervé Léger bandage dress first worn by her supermodel mother at the 1993 Oscars. The hair was voluminous, the jewels vintage, the mouth parted just so. She–in a stunning turn of events–looked just like Cindy Crawford.
But these demonstrations of old-school glamour are few and far between for the new-gen supers–Gerber is more likely to be photographed with a bookish tote bag than she is a jumbo-sized Birkin. And so, while her mother was last night dressed in a boudoir-ish Veronica Beard slip and an outsized biker jacket for dinner at Hotel Chelsea in New York, Gerber wore a high-neck boho blouse cut from grandma-ish lace, tailored trousers and face-swamping reading glasses. (This is, after all, someone who is known to read novels backstage at fashion shows and established her own book club in 2020.)
“There’s a strain of thought that says it’s terrible that books have seemingly become accessories in a kind of Instagram-inflected way,” the author Lauren Oyler–whose novel Fake Accounts featured in Gerber’s Instagram reading club–said in a 2021 profile. “I think it’s great for beautiful people with charmed lives to be exposed to what is sort of a difficult, ultimately pretty depressing book, because there isn’t a lot of that perspective in mainstream American culture.” True–but even a bookworm enjoys a blowout.