Kris says she’s about to go over to Kim and Kanye’s place—she says it just like that, all casual—and then the three of them will meet Kendall at the Balmain show, this afternoon, in which Kendall is walking the runway.

Kendall, half listening, moving around the room with the restlessness of a bored teenager and the ease of someone who basically lives in hotel rooms, reaches into a yellow Selfridges bag and pulls out a black rabbit-fur felt hat that turns out to be the Kendall hat, a limited-edition Karl Lagerfeld-designed bit of millinery vended exclusively at Selfridges and recently purchased with pride by Kris. Kendall puts the hat on and studies herself in Kris’s mirror.

Now, maybe it’s the jet lag, but this whole scene seems symbolic. If you’ll step with me into the warm, reassuring light of the Keeping Up with the Kardashians confession booth for a moment... For a while it was commonplace to point to the Jenner-Kardashians as some sort of new, depressing evolution in the form of the American family, whose desire for fame burned so hot that it actually made them famous, a spray-tanned snake eating its own Swarovski-encrusted tail. This was always only partly true at best—weren’t they in fact famous for being super entertaining on television? like Jon Hamm? or Guy Fieri?—but one thing you really get, sitting in the lemon yellow Four Seasons suite, watching Kendall Jenner try on a hat named for Kendall Jenner as her proud mother looks on, is how hoary that entire conversation feels in 2015. Kendall Jenner is past all that.

Let us now behold her in her eponymous $630 hat, picking her way across the shopping-bag-strewn floor, the immaculate result of her family’s long-sought betterment, the far end of a long arc of aspiration, with the taste and bone structure to prove it. She has what we should want for our children and our children’s children: a life of steady work and good fortune. You might sneer, but it’s true. I would sacrifice a wombat for my future daughter to be in this exact suite, trying on this exact hat. It’s infectious, their comfort here. My grandfather grew up in an orphanage in Brooklyn and now I’m in Paris, taking my ease at the Four Seasons, and all my ancestors are duly proud, thank you very much. But the Jenners might as well have ridden in here on a wagon train, the extent to which they’ve been hurtling ceaselessly toward the finish line of the American Dream.

And Kendall is the family’s most refined product yet, wildly successful without even the taint of all the hard tabloid labor—Bruce’s I’m a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! appearances and Kim’s home movie, the long, family-wide, soulful prison phone calls with Joe Francis—that brought her to this point. She is the regal JFK to her mother’s liquor-running Joe Kennedy, the beneficiary of her family’s ambition, the realization of their dreams. "My life was always different growing up," she says. "I mean, even before the show, my dad was who he is. He’s an Olympic athlete. And we were going to premieres, like Finding Nemo premieres, and we would be little kids, like, before the show, walking down the red carpet." As a kid, she’d visit the Neverland Ranch. "I remember going, actually, and as I was leaving, Michael Jackson was coming in. And I was like, ’Oh, my God! That was Michael Jackson!’ "

Casually, she’ll say things like "When I was younger, we lived in a horse community."

A horse community! America! May all our children live in horse communities.

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Outside the four seasons, the paparazzi have gone kudzu and multiplied. The Jenner team has swapped our li’l Smart car for a burly Range Rover, and endearingly, as the photographers strobe away, Kendall asks the driver if he’d mind letting her take the wheel instead. Bruce taught her how to drive when she was only 10, she says; doing it now "makes me feel like I’m home." You can tell—she drives so easily, so naturally, that it takes me a moment to realize she’s doing it within a diamond-shaped phalanx of pursuing photographers in cars and on scooters, dipping and turning circles around the Range. I get vertigo just looking out the window. But she’s grinning.

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This life, the crazy caravan of borderline suicidal men trailing the car, is all she knows. Think about that! None of us choose what we are born into, but few of us are born into circumstances like hers. Grew up literally live on television, to the point where she’s not even sure if she can remember what her life was really like before Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Her mother and sisters chose this. But "me and my little sister were placed in," Kendall says. "Like, ’Okay, there’s gonna be a TV show around.’ We didn’t have a say. And how could we have a say? It was in our home. There was no way we couldn’t be on it."