A Woman Is a Weapon
In 2008 at the age of fourteen, I very inadvertently rose to prominence within the fashion industry as the youngest internationally distributed print magazine editor in the world, a provenance that I still hold. And while the world saw (and the press perpetuated) a very glossy life and a stratospheric rise to the front rows of fashion weeks, photo shoots, interviews with top media outlets, and international TV spots, what they didn’t know was that just six months prior, my life could not have been any further from where they thought it was.
The mid-to-late aughts were a very unique time in the press – hot off the heels of mass celebutante socialite fixation and in the throes of Gossip Girl mania, relatability did not sell – aspiration did. So when I hired my first publicist in 2009 at the age of 15, my story was polished beyond recognition and packaged in bulk to the press, turning me from the average girl that I truly was to a manufactured debutante. They didn’t want girls to think that they could become me, they wanted them to wish that they could be. It was for these same reasons that I would leave the fashion industry soon thereafter, vowing to achieve more for this world – and for my life. But more on that later.
To be labeled a “nepo baby” or “little rich girl” for the past seventeen years would be quite funny to me, if it wasn’t totally disheartening. I’ve been contacted throughout the years by girls who asked what my advice for success would be if they “didn’t have the money I had” and “didn’t know the people I knew.” It was then that I realized that I not only had the will to set my story straight, but the responsibility to – not just to myself, but for all of the girls out there that want to do what I did, but never thought that there could be a way.
In 2020 I was approached by one of the biggest literary agencies in the world to finally write my story in my own words. Naturally, I titled it A Woman Is a Weapon. I worked on the draft for quite some time before all publications were put on indefinite hiatus due to the unabating pandemic. By the time they resumed, I was building Noir full-time.
On the brink of returning from a seven-year-long hiatus which I spent recovering from Lyme disease and its many complications, I have exhausted a copious amount of time reflecting on my experience in the industry, the much-needed ego death that my illness brought me, and how – for the first time in my life – I’m finally doing what I was meant to do.
Whether or not I will ever bring the memoir to completion is to be seen – I’m honestly not sure my ego will allow me to and often cringe at the concept – but until then, I decided to release the draft of its first chapter that delves into my upbringing and how Prim actually came to be.
For all the girls out there that want to, but think that they never could…
x, K
“You’ve been called a rock star Anna Wintour. Do you agree with that?” “Who are you wearing?” “How does it feel to be labeled a prodigy?” A prodigy? The camera flashes begin to flare rapidly until my vision has become nothing but a bluish purple haze. Through the disorienting blur, I begin to identify the familiar faces of the individuals that are dashing to their seats – Jefferson Hack. Hamish Bowles. Patrick Demarchelier. Julie Gilhart. Steven Klein. “Oh, I’m not too sure about that,” I answer back timidly, surely a minute too late. Is the camera still even rolling? I sit back down. The lights dim. The show starts. I still have no idea how I got here.
I’ve heard that people dream of this kind of life, charmed with front rows, designer garments, paparazzi, and interviews. The truth is, I wouldn’t know. Up until this point, my entire life was spent wanting to become a detective, a hacker, a professional basketball player, or a rock star. In fact, I spent all of my days playing point guard on the basketball court and passed my nights by testing my neighbor’s patience with the help of a Fender amp and an alpine white Les Paul Custom. My personal heroes were Stephon Marbury and Jimmy Page, not Coco Chanel and Diane von Furstenberg. So how did a fourteen-year-old girl who couldn’t even spell Balenciaga inadvertently end up in the eye of a fashion world storm? Do you believe in fate?
See, I do believe in fate (or synchronicity, as we like to call it), and so much so that it nearly dictates every single thing that I do in life. I started getting my cards read when I was sixteen (they’ve never not come true) and I treat fortune cookies like a genuine religion (my stories would blow your mind). There is a legitimate science to all of this by the way, but this is a memoir and not a textbook on quantum theory, so I’ll spare you on that for now. More stories on this later. But my point is that even though I had all of these big dreams in sport and music, when I received a random email one day from Naomi Nevitt (the then-Online Editorial Assistant at Teen Vogue) requesting an interview with me about my newest project, as bizarre as I found it, I treated it as prophetic. How could I, a misfit with not a ton of money and absolutely zero connections, be commanding the attention of one of the largest publications in the world? Things like this simply didn’t happen to people like me, yet I found it just fortuitous enough to trade my sneakers in for. True to form, I felt overwhelmingly compelled to find out what this had in store for me. Little did I know, it was this very article that would change my life forever.
I was born on a blustery, cold December 24th, 1993 in New York City. It was a Friday, the day before Christmas, and the first thing that the doctor said about me was that I had “perfectly heart shaped lips.” I mention this only because I feel that my day of birth fittingly justifies two things that I regularly take a bit of heat for – both my love of the holidays and also a penchant for a perfectly accentuating amount of lip filler. See, I have my reasons.
My mother was an English teacher, and my father had just opened up his own pharmacy. Neither of my parents came from money, and in fact they were both the children or grandchildren of immigrants. My mother’s side of the family mostly hailed from Ireland, and my paternal grandfather fled Italy for Ellis Island in the early 1940s. My father’s family, having just recently settled from Naples, had very little money, which prompted him to start working multiple jobs at the early age of sixteen. My mother’s father died when she was young, and since she had four other siblings, she helped my grandmother (who was the most independent woman and a total badass) in whatever ways that she possibly could.
When I was young, my parents moved out of Brooklyn to settle down in a more suburban, conservative beachside community located about forty-five minutes outside of Manhattan. It was here that I would spend my grammar and high school years, struggling desperately to find any kind of acceptance.
As I picked myself up from the brittle thorn bush whose tens of snow covered needles had embedded the backs of my thighs, the resounding snarl of the slur that he screamed at me while pushing me down played over and over in my head – “dyke.” I watched him turn around and walk back down the block, high-fiving his friends all the way down the street until they became just blurry specks in my anger-teared eyes. Once again, I was alone. Growing up unapologetically different in a conservative community proved to not only be a brave existence, but an exhausting one, where your life simply mimics a mere echo chamber of every insult repeatedly hurled at you. This day though, in retrospect, was different. As I brushed myself off and looked behind me at the blood speckled snow, I felt an uncontainable fire within me, one that told me to this time get better, not even. It was this very thought that would change the entire course of my life.
The fact was, this wasn’t the first time that I faced abuse for being different. In all actuality, it was quickly becoming something that I was wistfully getting used to. Just a week prior, a girl put a wad of gum in my hair in front of my entire math class. A racket of laughter quickly erupted. I don’t think I’ll ever quite forget the feeling that I had while running into the bathroom to cut it out by myself, that or the captivating way that the lustrous silver scissors glistened in the sunlight. That’s one thing about me – I’ve always tried to find the beauty.
In all honesty, after a while, these things didn’t bother me much. I never changed the way that I looked or the way that I dressed, nor did I ever deny the fact that I liked women. Why would I? After all, in retrospect, I’d like to thank all of the kids who made my life a living hell, because if nothing else, they prepared me for a career full of harsh criticism from total strangers in the press. That’s something that, at the time, I never knew that I’d find useful, but life is funny, isn’t it? You’re never given what you don’t need.
I went to high school at Fontbonne Hall Academy in Brooklyn, a magnificent old waterfront mansion that they converted into an all girls Catholic school, complete with a foyer, a courtyard, and, of course, a chapel. In retrospect, it probably would have made a lot more sense for me to attend a high school more driven towards the arts, where I would have assimilated much easier, but, if you couldn’t already tell, I do believe that everything happens for a reason. Fontbonne’s reason was my art teacher, Len Bellinger, otherwise known as Mr. B, a wildly shocking staffing choice for such a puritanical environment.
Mr. B had striking silver hair and a goatee, and he only ever wore a black oxford and black blazer with a pair of black pants and black shoes to match. And given the fact that, to this day, I could solely exist off of a single white wifebeater and a pair of black low rise skinny jeans, I respected that. He was one of the first fine artists to exhibit at PS1 back in the day, and he both roamed and exhibited at the galleries of New York decades ago in their golden age.
He was deliciously irreverent and insisted on calling me KFC (a play on my legal initials) because I was always so thin. He was the first person that I told I was gay who responded with a look of “and?” The thing was, you couldn’t shock Mr. B, and this proved to be the perfect launchpad for me to receive a masterclass in art knowledge. B exposed me to a world that I never knew existed, but somehow always wished did in my head. I learned about the life and careers of polarizing artists such as Pierre Molinier, Chris Burden, Carolee Schneemann, Tracey Emin, and Kembra Pfahler, which changed the landscape of my mind forever. There was a world out there much more vast than the one that I was exposed to, and I made it my goal to set out and find it.
In late 2007, I decided to manifest this affirmation by developing an online fashion/art magazine, Prim, as a means of escapism, productivity, and connection. Having made tens of invaluable friends on the Teen Vogue forums earlier that year, we swiftly assembled a staff of fifteen girls and excitedly got to work. It was this outlet that became a second home for me, a place where I was finally accepted. I would rush home after school and log into my account, feverishly communicating with young girls across the globe who seemingly also didn’t have a place – together, we made a refuge of creativity, acceptance, respect, and tolerance. Prim, I concluded, would rigorously mimic these values.
After months of developing and planning, our first edition was finally presented on April 1st, 2008. Immediately picking up traction on the forums, we had over one thousand unique readers within our first day. Nine days later on April 10th, I found myself sitting unsurprisingly alone in my high school library. As I tapped my Micron on the long oak table, I glanced at one of the unoccupied computers by the window and felt this curious impulse to check my email. I walked over to the desk, pulled out the rolling chair beneath it, sat down, and logged in. Spam. Spam. Spam. Naomi Nevitt? The subject read “Teen Vogue.” Even weirder. I clicked on the strange email (which was initially marked as junk), and read the message:
Hi!
This is Naomi Nevitt, the Online Editorial Assistant of TeenVogue.com. How are you? We at Teen Vogue love Prim and we’re very interested in profiling the magazine and its editors. Please send me any and all information about the magazine and staff that you may have! Thanks so much! Looking forward to hearing from you soon!
Best,
Naomi
I quickly signed out, shut the window, and walked back to my solitary seat at the grand table. Don’t react, I told myself, this has to be a trick. Already, I was mortified. I looked around the library in search of a group of snickering girls peering at me, absolutely certain that this had to be a cruel joke. To my surprise, absolutely no one was there. Could it really be? I slowly walked back over to the computer, signed into my email address, and reread the message. This time, I examined it closely enough to realize that it had originated from an @condenast.com email address. This was no joke. Needless to say, I immediately obliged.
I wish that I could remember the way that it felt, but honestly I don’t recall. I guess I’d liken it to the feeling that someone gets when their wildest dream finally comes true, with so many swirling emotions on overdrive that you just go kind of numb. As someone who had a historically hard time in life, where nothing truly came easily, it simply felt too good to be true. Yet somehow, it wasn’t. And while I’d say that receiving such an email was, in fact, a dream come true, receiving press was never something that I even thought was possible. I was perfectly content with Prim having a few readers per issue – after all, its true purpose at the end of the day was simply to give all of us like-minded rejects a home.
The article ran just a few weeks later, and what came after that could be described as nothing short of a whirlwind. To put it simply, press in the late aughts was a game of dominoes, and while it’s often said that all you need is one big break, nothing could possibly hold more truth. Within months, I was gracing the pages of major media outlets such as French Glamour, ELLE Italia, Time Out New York, and The Guardian, all while doing handfuls of international TV spots in between. The attention was strange, but I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t somewhat enjoy it. To go from being viciously belittled for being different to celebrated for it by strangers all over the world is quite an experience, and one that takes a bit of adjusting to. Within months, I was given a global platform. Faced with new challenges and experiences that I never dreamt possible, I decided to make one comprehensive mission the focal point of my career: inclusivity, acceptance, empowerment, and tolerance – the very essential things that I struggled to find so often throughout my entire life.
One year later, Prim’s demand was increasing beyond anyone’s initial expectations and grew into a full-fledged print magazine with thousands upon thousands of copies circulating across five continents. And so as I matured, so did Prim’s content, which became known for its progressive spirit rooted in female empowerment and sexuality, equality, and ardent provocation. I enlisted over two-hundred fringed, often female and/or LGBTQ creatives an edition in order to create this interior world that I had always wanted – and not only was it productive, but it was amassing in popularity. In 2011, our readership swelled to just over 512,000 readers an issue between our print and online editions. Everything had come full circle – the utopia that I was once looking for I had now created for people like me around the world; the fringed creative that I once was, was now giving other outsiders an opportunity to work, co-create, and cohabitate in a luxe, provocative, and timeless glossy environment for the entire industry to see. We finally belonged.
My entire career has been spent lending voices to young women who often find themselves powerless without having the proper connections, income channels, popularity, or confidence. Though most of the world would take kindly to having you believe that you cannot succeed without any of those things, the truth is that I – as a thirteen-year-old, misfit, lonely, bullied, gay young woman with no prior connections or experience – made it happen. And now I am here to tell you that you can too, without it taking a snowy thorn bush and one final shove to do so.
Just get better, not even.
