Karlie Elizabeth Kloss (born August 3, 1992) is an American model and ballet dancer.
Kloss is ranked 4th on the
Top 50 Models Women List by models.com. Vogue Paris declared her one of the top 30 models of the 2000s.
Kloss was born in Chicago, Illinois, and her family moved to suburban St. Louis, Missouri in 1995. Before making it as a model, Kloss studied at Caston's Ballet Academy in 2002, a prestigious dance school in St. Louis. She soon became very talented at dance, and was in a number of performances such as the Nutcracker. Kloss has called her classical ballet training "a beautiful thing" that taught her how to move in the modeling world and was a great training ground for her runway walk.
When Kloss was 13, she was discovered at a charity fashion show in St. Louis. She was encouraged and inspired to model by one of her teachers in Webster Groves High School. In 2007, she signed with Elite Model Management.
