On April 10th, 2012, South Korean pop culture giant YG Entertainment posted a cryptic photo to their official blog. In the image, a girl looks off-camera, dressed in a pink-and-white checkered shirt, with auburn streaks running through her black hair. Simply titled “WHO’S THAT GIRL???,” the breadcrumb was part of a teaser campaign for a forthcoming new girl group. One month later, a YouTube video with the same name appeared online—a one-minute, 36-second hypnotic clip of trainees dancing in the shadows, except for one girl, illuminated in a tight spotlight as she performs, her face too distant to capture, her dance movements too precise and charismatic to ignore. The video has since been viewed nearly twenty-four million times.
Finally, on August 29th of the same year, YG unveiled the girl in question: Jennie Kim (김제니), a sixteen-year-old trainee fluent in Korean, English, and Japanese. Fast forward 13 years, and Jennie is one of the most famous women in the world. Yet visibility is not the same as transparency; despite being everywhere, she remains, in some ways, just as elusive as that shadowed girl in the teaser. So, who is that girl with 89 million Instagram followers? It’s a mystery sustained not by secrecy, but by evolution—Jennie is always in motion, and always beginning again.“I can’t believe I’m still saying this,” Jennie begins over Zoom from Manila, Philippines, just days after our cover shoot in Los Angeles, “because it’s something I said a year ago before my first album [Ruby], but I feel like a baby stepping into the world.” That curiosity and wide-eyed wonder regarding her career’s possibilities remain a constant throughout our conversation—childlike, but never childish.
Though she jokes, “You’re not allowed to say that!” when I mentioned her forthcoming thirtieth birthday, she speaks of the new decade with a spirit of inquiry rather than dread. “I just can’t wait for this new chapter of mine to open, not because I’m entering my 30s, but because there are just so many exciting things that I’ve planned ahead,” she explains. “I feel like I lived my 20s with passion and love.” She also lived them with a fastidious work ethic (BLACKPINK has sold over 20 million records worldwide and was the first K-pop girl group to dominate charts in the West, with her aforementioned debut solo album debuting in the top 10 in 19 countries). “As far as I know, I’m going to be in Tokyo. I’m going to have a show the night of my birthday, and that whole week too,”
she says—a fitting celebration for someone whose dedication borders on superhuman. The parallel to William Klein’s 1966 film Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?—a key ingredient in the Twiggy-tinged, ’60s-infused cocktail of a moodboard behind our cover shoot—is irresistible. In that satirical portrait of the Paris fashion world, a young American model named Polly Maggoo becomes the obsession of designers, photographers, and TV crews, all determined to uncover her “true self.” The more they search, the more she disappears beneath projections of beauty and desire. “Every time they take my picture,” Polly famously sighs, “there’s a little less of me left.”