Rosie Scott Blog about Women

Talking to Jenna Klein can feel a little confusing at first. She’s got that whole girl-next-door thing down pat; the relaxed charm, the sense of fun, the type of girl who you can picture sharing a beer (or two) with out at the bar. But then there is the whole matter of what she looks like: the transfixing, double-take provoking classic beauty with a tinge of otherworldliness, the wide blue eyes and too-cool-for-school septum piercing to boot. But just when you are about to get lost in the dreamy, wide-open planes of her face, she brings you back to earth with a Midwestern twang that reveals itself whenever she utters a chummy “You know?,” which she does often. And Klein comes by her all-American dream girl roots honestly, as a third generation General Motors worker who grew up in Flint, Michigan, a onetime automotive boomtown now synonymous with deterioration, bailouts, and its ranking among the most dangerous cities in the United States—a place where good luck can be hard to come by.

Which is why at age nineteen, with no real college plans in sight, Klein entered the workforce at the General Motors Lake Orion Assembly Plant on the factory floor. The plant eventually closed in 2009, and in 2010, Klein moved with her husband, also a General Motors worker, to another plant in Lordstown, Ohio. “I mostly worked in general assembly plants, where the entire car is pretty much built from the frame out. My first job was putting the battery tray in. It was bolting it down and hooking up a few connections for the headlight—and you do that four or five hundred times a night,” says Klein. “I used to put airbags and the backseat cushion in, too. There was a terrible job where I was putting all of the stuff in the trunk, the tool set, jack, and a spare tire. I was carrying tires every day, walking something like five miles a day. I didn’t mind it at first, but doing it every day destroys your body.”

The dream of modeling was never far from her thoughts. Growing up, Klein stacked her shelves with Teen Vogue and Victoria’s Secret catalogs. A few times she even dragged her mother to model searches at the local Holiday Inn. “It was corny. You had to look for it in the paper back then, too. It never worked out though,” says Klein. “My mom was like, ‘You’re not doing this. I’m not paying for this. It’s a scam!’” Coworkers at the GM plant became her cheering section. “They would say things like, ‘You need to remember us when you’re a famous model,’” says Klein. “And it was like, if you guys only knew, I would drop this in a second. But after being at GM for so long, the dream died.”

But a twist of fate—a friend of a friend who needed a roommate in Chicago—offered another chance. “We were ready to settle down and we were buying a house. I was like, Am I really ready? If I stay and we are together, I’m going to end up pregnant,” says Klein. “I was going to give myself one last chance.” From there, Klein signed with a model agency and shortly after joined the ranks at DNA Models in New York City. Since then, Klein has made the move to New York City (her husband will be joining her in a few months), and has scored a few runway shows, ranging from Timo Weiland and Jonathan Simkhai to Thom Browne. But there are bigger things that await the fresh face, who has already scored a denim campaign with Banana Republic, among others. And as for her past at General Motors and her pals back in Flint? “There are plenty of things to appreciate about it,” says Klein. “But if it isn’t what you want to to do, you aren’t going to be happy.” And taking the big risks to reap the big rewards—and what could be more of a big reward than chasing a childhood dream?—has made Jenna Klein something of a hometown hero, as well as what could very well be the next big thing.

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