Kaia Gerber Reveals How She Truly Feels About Growing up With Mom Cindy Crawford’s Naked Photos Around the House

Kaia Gerber is getting unusually candid about what it was like to grow up with supermodel mom Cindy Crawford — including the part where naked photos of her mom “lined the walls.”

In a new Harper’s Bazaar cover story published Jan. 21, the 24-year-old model and actor who has had her fair share of twinning moments with her mom, explained that the images “lined the walls” during her childhood. “They were, to me, artistic,” Gerber said. “It wasn’t vulgar; it wasn’t objectification.” She added that it was “a gift to grow up in a house that was without shame for the female body.”

That perspective fits with how Gerber described her upbringing overall: “pretty isolated,” but also “as normal as it could have been,” with public school, community theater, choir, dance, and plenty of musicals (including seeing Wicked eight times and memorizing the lyrics to Rent by age 9).

If this sounds like the same Kaia who’s been quietly dropping extremely specific childhood details in interviews for the past couple of years, it is. In April 2024, Gerber talked about how Crawford prepped her for her first fashion show by gathering the family and playing “compilation videos of models falling” during a stop on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Gerber joked, “I didn’t even know you could fall this many different ways.”

And in Nov. 2024, she shared another “most Hollywood thing” from her L.A. childhood: Pamela Anderson served as her elementary school crossing guard. “She wore the yellow safety vest and everything,” Gerber said.

Gerber has also talked about realizing, as an adult, what Crawford’s career actually meant. In a 2024 WSJ Magazine interview, she said watching Apple TV+’s The Super Models made her newly aware of her mom’s icon status. “I didn’t realize… I knew you were iconic, but … I didn’t understand when I was younger,” she said. “I was starstruck in front of her after.”

In the Harper’s Bazaar interview, the nude photo detail lands less like a shock anecdote and more like a boundary-setting one: Gerber is spelling out that, in her house, the female body wasn’t treated as something to hide — and she’s not interested in reframing it that way now.

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