Quote of the Day: Karlie Kloss on Coding as the Language of the Future

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When Karlie Kloss said these words in 2016, she was sitting at the top of one of the most competitive industries on earth — a Victoria’s Secret Angel who had just walked dozens of runways in a single season and appeared on more than 30 international Vogue covers. By every external measure, she had already shaped the future; she was the face of it. And yet the sentence she kept repeating was not about fashion at all. It was a quiet insistence that the power to decide what comes next does not belong to the people who wear the clothes, or even the ones who photograph them — it belongs to the people who build the systems everyone else will live inside. “Coding is the future,” she said, and the future is shaped by whoever learns to speak its language.

The claim has a sharp edge to it, because it is really an argument about who gets to be an author of the future rather than a character in it. When she learned to code at the Flatiron School in 2014, Kloss had a front-row seat to a world being rebuilt around her: social platforms, marketplaces, media — all of it running on software written overwhelmingly by men. Her point was that this is not a neutral fact about talent. It is a consequence of who gets invited in. By encouraging more young women to code, she was not simply adding one more life skill to the résumé of teenage girls. She was trying to rebalance who writes the rules of the world her own daughters would grow up in — a conviction she has repeated in interviews, at coding camps, and in her 2025 children’s book Spaghetti Code.

There is also a humbler lesson folded into the line. Kloss did not pretend coding was easy or that she had always been good at it. She has been candid about the insecurity of sitting in a classroom full of engineers and feeling behind — about being the model in the room who had to ask questions everyone else seemed to find obvious. The quote is not an advertisement for instant mastery. It is an argument for showing up anyway. She describes the reason she launched Kode With Klossy — free summer coding camps for girls and non-binary teens — as a response to the fact that the tech industry loses most girls long before they ever consider a career in it. The barrier, she has said, is less about ability and more about invitation. You cannot shape a future you were never told was yours to shape.

And the sentence lands with new weight in 2026. Two weeks after her children’s book about the power of big ideas reached young readers, her husband Joshua Kushner and Disney’s Bob Iger agreed to buy the Los Angeles Lakers for a record $12.5 billion — making Karlie Kloss, who married into that story, a co-owner of one of the most iconic sports franchises in the world. Her Wikipedia page spiked to more than 129,000 views on August 12 as the world caught up with the woman behind the headlines. But the woman behind the headlines has spent a decade saying the same thing: the future is not something you inherit, it is something you build. Coding was her way in. Learning to write the language of the machines was how she refused to be a character in someone else’s story — and turned herself into one of the people writing it.

About Karlie Kloss

Karlie Elizabeth Kloss was born on August 3, 1992, in Chicago, the daughter of a freelance art director and an emergency physician, and grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. She was a cheerleader and a straight-A student with a towering height that made her feel like an outlier in high school — she has spoken about being bullied for it. Everything changed in 2006 when, at 14, she was photographed for a local magazine’s cover story and signed by Elite Model Management. By the spring of 2008 she had walked 31 shows at New York Fashion Week, and in a single season she racked up 64 shows across New York, Milan, and Paris. She was 15 years old.

What followed was one of the great modeling careers of the modern era: the face of Christian Dior and Estée Lauder, a Victoria’s Secret Angel from 2013 to 2015, 40 international Vogue covers by 2019, and her own collaborations from Karlie’s Kookies for charity to a jeans line with Frame. But the defining turn of her story came when she chose to leave the world that had made her famous. In 2015 she walked away from Victoria’s Secret, later citing concerns with the brand’s messaging to young women, and enrolled at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. The year before, she had spent her summer at the Flatiron School learning Ruby on Rails — a decision that surprised her industry and quietly reframed what a supermodel could be.

In April 2015 she launched Kode With Klossy, a nonprofit that runs free coding camps for girls and non-binary teens aged 13 to 18. By 2025 it had built a community of almost 11,000 young people across more than 100 countries, teaching Ruby, JavaScript, and Swift to students who build real apps and websites by the end of each camp. She has carried that mission into the media world too: she led the investor group that bought W magazine in 2020, acquired British fashion magazine i-D in 2023 and became its CEO, and in 2024 revived the print edition of Life magazine through Bedford Media, the company she runs with her husband. In December 2025 she announced her debut picture book, Spaghetti Code: A Story About Problem-Solving, Pasta, and the Power of Big Ideas, inspired by her work with Kode With Klossy.

Her public life has also been defined by the family she built and the choices she made inside it. She married venture capitalist Joshua Kushner in 2018 after converting to Judaism; they have three children. Politically and personally, she has deliberately drawn lines — supporting Democratic candidates, serving as a Planned Parenthood care escort in her twenties, founding the Gateway Coalition in 2022 to support Midwestern abortion clinics, and helping pass Amendment 3 enshrining abortion rights in Missouri’s constitution in 2024. She has called the constant spotlight on her husband’s family name “frustrating” because it shifts attention away from her own career. Then came August 12, 2026: the report that Kushner and Bob Iger had agreed to buy the Los Angeles Lakers for $12.5 billion — the highest price ever paid for a professional sports team — sent her Wikipedia page surging past 129,000 views in a single day. But Karlie Kloss was already part of the ownership group, part of the most improbable reinvention in fashion’s modern history. She left the runway to learn the language of the future — and she has spent the decade since making sure other girls knew they could too.

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