Jennie

In a rare and exclusive interview, the singer and rapper opens up to Vogue about her travel tips, her taste in fashion and what it means to be a global icon.

- ASHLEY OGAWA CLARKE

Imagine a place where hot pink sand dunes undulate under a surreal sky and BLACKPINK hits play on repeat in the background. In a rare interview with Jennie, she takes us on a trip to a unique place. And this is where we touched down: the Jennieverse. Wearing Chanel’s 2022-23 Métiers d’art collection, which was inspired by Dakar in Senegal, our cover star is perhaps the perfect example of what travel—both in the digital and physical sense— can mean in 2023.

With her dimpled smile and kittenish demeanour, Jennie, whose full name is Jennie Kim, is the blueprint for a new kind of global megastar. Growing up in New Zealand and Seoul, she might still be labelled a K-pop singer, but her influence can hardly be contained to one nation. The first South Korean female artist to perform solo at Coachella in 2019 (with her aptly named song ‘Solo’), she’s now making her mark in Hollywood with an acting debut in Sam Levinson’s grittily glamorous series The Idol, co-starring Lily-Rose Depp and Abel Tesfaye.

For the 27-year-old, her fame is like inhabiting two different worlds simultaneously. “Jennie onstage is charismatic and powerful, but offstage I’m just a normal, shy girl,” she shares. Still, with 80 million followers on Instagram (that’s more than the entire population of South Korea) and legions of BLACKPINK fans—known as Blinks— following her every move, staying down to Earth can’t be easy. Search her name on TikTok and you’ll be met with a wall of fan-created Jennie content, from clips admiring her dynamic choreography onstage to memes fawning over her famous grin.