“Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone / Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone / Silence the pianos and with muffled drum / Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.”
These lines form the opening stanza to WH Auden’s 1936 poem Funeral Blues—an expression of knee-buckling grief and despair upon the loss of a beloved—but could just as feasibly be applied to Hailey Bieber’s total absence from Getty Images over the past couple of weeks. (The mogul is on maternity leave after welcoming her firstborn and has not appeared in public since July 31.) Perhaps that is why Kendall Jenner has taken it upon herself to dress in the precise image of her best friend.
The model was photographed exiting Alaïa’s spring/summer 2025 show in New York in a crop top and an outsized leather blazer from The Row with tailored shorts and an Hermès So Kelly bag. This is pretty much Bieber’s off-duty template: a sort of fledgling tomboy that might have played the anti-hero in a ’90s coming-of-age movie. It’s no-fuss and it’s approachable and it’s the visual equivalent of Rhode’s so-simple-it-pains tag line: “One of everything really good.”
There was a certain back-to-school-ness about the look—white-socked loafers will do that to a person—that could otherwise be mapped across several of Jenner’s recent appearances. Buttoned-up dresses for the US Open; skirt suits for an evening at Cipriani and Zero Bond in Manhattan; and an Olsens-made double denim set for a daytime stroll with an Hermès Kelly so pristine that it looked like a briefcase. These outfits are, for obvious reasons, a sea change from the string bikinis and crochet columns that Kendall Jenner was uploading to Instagram just last month. The caption could read: “Get your f****** ass up and work, it seems like nobody wants to work these days”.
This article first appeared on British Vogue.
