Kamala Harris' Stepdaughter Ella Emhoff's Dramatic Transformation

Ella Emhoff was just supporting her stepmom’s political ambitions when she sparked a “Who’s that girl?” moment that propelled her into style superstardom. It was an unexpected development, sure, but her parents seemed to think she was destined to do something big; after all, her namesake is a larger-than-life music legend. Ella’s parents, Doug Emhoff and Kerstin Emhoff, named her after jazz great Ella Fitzgerald because they’re big fans of the music genre.

Ella was born in 1999. Hillary Clinton was in the White House at the time — as the first lady — and Donald Trump was about to launch a short-lived bid for the presidency by vying to be the Reform Party candidate. It would be many years before another presidential hopeful, Kamala Harris, would force Donald to shake hands with her during a debate. It would also be over a decade before Harris made Ella’s acquaintance. At the time of her future stepdaughter’s birth, she was working at the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office as the Career Criminal Unit’s managing attorney. 

Kerstin is an executive producer, telling Little Black Book that she worked on Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” music video when she was pregnant with Ella’s older brother, Cole Emhoff. As for Doug, the first second gentleman was an attorney who co-founded his own law firm in 2000. So, Ella has grown up surrounded by talent and ambition, an environment that can be conducive for greatness. Of her OG family and stepfamily, Ella told Glamour, “It’s insane how between the two families, there are that many powerful role models we have to look up to.” However, her parents and stepmom couldn’t have predicted what shape her success would take.

In an interview with Garage, Ella Emhoff revealed that she grew up watching colorful cartoons that already would have been considered retro when she was a kid, including “Care Bears” and “Rainbow Brite.” However, she didn’t spend too many hours of the day with her eyes glued to a television screen. “Young Ella was a very crafty kid who just couldn’t sit still,” she told Marie Claire.

Emhoff also took up a hobby that some might consider old-fashioned. “My mom taught me how to knit at a Disneyland hotel when I was six years old with some kit from Target,” she recalled. Little did she know how instrumental her first pair of knitting needles would be in shaping her future.

In a 2021 New York Fashion Week interview shared on the YouTube page for the Proenza Schouler luxury label, Emhoff revealed that she also started becoming interested in fashion as a kid. “My mom was super into fashion, so I’d always play dress up in her closet and just wear her high heels,” she recalled to designers Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez. One of her early career aspirations was fashion design, and she had the right attitude for what can be a cutthroat profession. “I felt really iconic when I was a kid,” she told Harper’s Bazaar. “I really had a lot of confidence, and I would do things that just felt like I’m the boss b***h of this world.”

After Doug Emhoff cheated on Kerstin Emhoff with their children’s nanny, the couple got divorced. Ella Emhoff, who was a tween at the time, didn’t express any feelings of bitterness over the split when looking back at the event in an interview with The New York Times. Rather, she said that she and her brother strengthened their bond with their dad when he moved out. “We made it through the random apartments, figuring out the dynamic of it being just us,” she recalled.

One of the first big political events of her lifetime that Ella remembers caring about was when Proposition 8 came up for a vote in 2008. The ballot initiative banned same-sex marriages in California, and just like Kamala Harris, the Emhoffs opposed it.

Harris and Doug’s first meeting occurred during a blind date in 2013. The future veep then had to meet her future stepchildren, and Ella was an instant fan. “It all felt so natural that it wasn’t even a big deal. It felt like we had known each other forever,” she told Glamour. She and her brother even came up with a cute nickname for Harris: “Momala.” During that era, Ella said she was somewhat “emo.” She told Garage, “I was really into Kandi, raver bracelets.” She also decided to try her hand at acting. In 2014, she appeared in comedian Bo Burnham’s music video for his song “Repeat Stuff.” In it, he parodies pop stars, and Ella plays a super fan of his teen idol cliché. Things take a dark turn when he smothers her character with a pillow, rips her heart out of her chest, and eats it.

Ella Emhoff’s mother, father, and stepmother had a healthy co-parenting relationship. Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife has even voiced her support for Kamala Harris throughout her political career. “I thought we had it good compared to a lot of other people I’d seen with divorced parents,” Ella recalled to The New York Times. Her parents were also supportive of her dreams. In her Proenza Schouler video, she reveals that she took classes at a renowned London fashion institution, Central Saint Martins, when she was in high school. “It definitely exposed me to the intensity of design school,” she said.

Ella had some teenage experiences that were more ordinary as well. In an essay for Elle, Kamala Harris recalls how she and Kerstin Emhoff supported Ella’s athletic endeavors. “She and I became a duo of cheerleaders in the bleachers at Ella’s swim meets and basketball games, often to Ella’s embarrassment,” Harris wrote. In 2015, a proud Kerstin took to Instagram to show off an award her daughter won in a backstroke race.

Ella’s junior and senior prom looks also make appearances on her parents’ Instagram accounts. Of the prom dress that she picked out during her junior year, Ella told Elle, “I went to a vintage store and found this $30 dress from the ’60s that looked like a cupcake.” For her senior prom, she chose a more modern, trendy look. She discovered that she felt far better in the first dress, which was more of a reflection of what her personal style is like now. She still decided to hang on to the second dress, though, despite disliking it. “It’ll be something that I can use to teach my children or grandchildren what not to wear down the line,” she explained.

Ella Emhoff started attending college at The New School’s Parsons School of Design in 2017. There, she decided to pursue a degree in fine arts with a focus on textiles. She had no idea at the time that something would soon happen that would fast-track her fashion career.

In 2020, President Joe Biden announced that Kamala Harris would be his running mate, and Emhoff decided to help the Democratic duo with their campaign. It was mere months into the COVID-19 pandemic at the time, so this was a bit tricky. “Not being together during all of this is hard,” she told Glamour. When she finally learned that her stepmom would become America’s first female vice president that November, Emhoff registered her first big blip on the fashion world’s radar; while watching Harris and Biden deliver their acceptance speeches, she wore a pinstripe suit from The Frankie Shop, which was a hit on social media.

When she wasn’t busy supporting her stepmom during the pandemic, Emhoff spent some of her free time giving herself tattoos. “I did my dog’s name, and I did a little flower,” she told Garage in November 2020. “[Then] I recently did my first big boy: [a] salmon fish with a flower hanging out of its mouth.” But that ink was all covered up underneath Emhoff’s houndstooth Miu Miu coat on inauguration day in 2021. The garment — which featured a large collar, embellished shoulders, and cinched waist — went viral on social media. “MAAA Make America Artsy Again,” tweeted one fan.

While chatting to Interview magazine, Ella Emhoff revealed that she fueled her favorite hobby by smoking weed during the days of the pandemic when she was stuck at home. “I was knitting from 9am to like, 11pm. I couldn’t stop,” she shared. Part of those fast and furious sessions were spent using a knitting machine to create pants for fans who adored the pair she had created for a college project. But soon, it would become more difficult for her to find time to churn out cozy clothing for 10 hours straight.

In 2021 — the same year she graduated from Parsons School of Design — Emhoff signed with IMG Models. “[Modeling] was not my plan. I sort of fell into it,” she told Marie Claire. She shared that she viewed modeling as a means to fund her own knitwear line.

While the popular narrative was that Emhoff’s inauguration day look got her the gig, she revealed that this wasn’t the case in her Proenza Schouler interview. She said that IMG’s late president, Ivan Bart, had actually noticed her at a smaller campaign event that took place before the inauguration. While modeling was far from being her dream job, she liked that she was bringing an unconventional look to an industry where diversity hasn’t always been celebrated. “All of my life, I had really low self-esteem and self-confidence, so this kind of felt like a way for me to take that back,” she told The Washington Post. “I have body hair, I have tattoos. … that’s not crazy in the scheme of things today, but it’s not what you’d consider, like, the most generic-type model.”

Ella Emhoff stayed booked and busy in 2021. That February, she made her debut at New York Fashion Week, where she walked in Proenza Schouler’s virtual runway show. In her video interview with the brand’s designers, she stated, “I definitely lost a little sleep the night before — half because I was worried I wasn’t going to wake up in time.” She also said that she understandably had the jitters, but designer Jack McCollough assured her that she nailed her walk and didn’t look like a newbie at all.

Perhaps it helped that Emhoff felt at home in the Big Apple. She’s an L.A. native, but while attending Paris Fashion Week in August 2021, she told Vanity Fair, “[I] didn’t feel like I was able to fully grow into myself until I moved to New York.” In the City of Lights, Emhoff also walked a show for Balenciaga: “I’m nervous, because I am not really good at walking in heels,” she admitted ahead of her stylish strut down the catwalk.

A month later, Emhoff was back in NYC for the hottest ticket in fashion: the Met Gala. Her red Adidas by Stella McCartney ensemble was a fusion of high fashion and athleisure: sporty wide-leg pants, sneakers, and a long-sleeved bodysuit with sheer panels and crystal embellishments. She told The New York Times that the look was designed with her personal style preferences in mind. “It’s definitely something I would wear in my own day-to-day life,” she said. “It makes me feel more comfortable in my own skin, in this environment that I’m not really used to.”

On the Parsons School of Design website, Ella Emhoff revealed that she drew from her childhood when creating the whimsical, wearable art that she submitted for her thesis. “I create a variety of knitwear pieces such as sweater vests, pants, and various headpieces inspired by my adolescent diary and different relics that I have saved,” she said. Her colorful creations began receiving so much love on Instagram that she launched her own limited knitwear collection in 2021, a collab with the brand Batsheva. Of her work with designer Batsheva Hay, Emhoff told Vogue, “Having the bright colors I love mixed with her traditional silhouettes; it was kind of the perfect melding of styles.”

Unfortunately, the items in the capsule collection — a corset, vest, and bag — didn’t become the must-have pieces of the season. “The day I released my first collection online was a little dramatic and tear-filled,” she told Marie Claire. “[The collection] didn’t sell as well as I thought it would, and the thought of releasing my knitwear to people I didn’t know sent me into a spiral.”

At least Emhoff had someone to comfort her when her fledgling fashion business failed: GQ Senior Associate Editor Samuel Hine. The model and the magazine man were spotted looking cozy in early 2021, walking hand-in-hand in the West Village and putting their arms around each other. That August, Emhoff confirmed their relationship to Vanity Fair while describing a date-night scenario that seems inspired by the Food Network series “Chopped”: buying a bunch of random produce and creating a dish out of their haul.

While Ella Emhoff was disappointed in the lack of interest in her first knitwear collection, she isn’t the type to let discouragement destroy her dream; she just had to explore other ways to share her love of knitting with the world. One novel idea she devised was her Soft Hands knitting club, where newbie knitters could learn the craft while sipping on wine. The gatherings were also a way to help Emhoff get those creative juices flowing. “A big part of my ability and inspiration to make knitwear is through community,” she told Marie Claire.

Emhoff revealed that there was also an eco-friendly element to her club: participants used donated materials. When she told Katie Holmes about the endeavor at a chance meeting at an event, the “Dawson’s Creek” actor even offered up some of her mom’s unused yarn. “Katie Holmes was not on my bingo card of people to send me yarn,” Emhoff said.

Emhoff was so passionate about her club that she didn’t let a painful medical condition stop her from teaching her students how to knit and purl. “I already have full-on tendonitis,” she said in a 2021 convo with other fashionistas for The Cut. “I wear a hard-cast orthopedic brace whenever I knit. My doctor was like, ‘Ella, this is crazy. I only see this amount of deterioration in this muscle in really old people.'” What did eventually force her to shut the club down was Kamala Harris’ political career. After Emhoff’s stepmom became the Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential nominee, Emhoff filmed an Instagram video announcing that she was suspending meetings for security reasons. She explained, “I am unable to conduct them, just to protect myself and other club members.”

By the time the Democratic National Convention rolled around in 2024, Ella Emhoff was sharing new photos of art pieces on her Instagram account instead of her previous beanies, pants, and tops. Using yarn as a canvas, she started creating a lot of wall art, which depicted everything from self-portraits to nostalgic cartoon characters and cherub-cheeked tomatoes. Of these decorative pieces, she said in her 2024 Marie Claire interview, “I’m excited to lean into more gallery work because it lends itself to you doing your thing, letting it sit in the exhibit, and then you can make the other thing.”

Emhoff also revealed that she was putting her modeling career in the rearview mirror so she could focus on her creative undertakings. “Having your likeness attached to your work also takes its toll … It’s just so intense — it makes you the way you make money,” she explained. However, she stepped back onto the style stage in a big way at the DNC.

Emhoff proved that she doesn’t need a runway or a red carpet to have a major fashion moment by wearing a custom look by designer Joe Ando, who is known for documenting his creation process in his popular TikTok videos. For Emhoff, he crafted a blue-and-white gown that looked like something a Disney princess might wear if she lived in Bushwick. “The dress feels like a ballerina tea party, but the muted tones help keep it from being too costume-like,” Ando told Elle. The look was a hit on social media, earning widespread praise from fans.

During her DNC speech, Ella Emhoff tried to convince her fellow Americans to vote for her Momala by sharing some sweet sentiments about Kamala Harris. “She’s never stopped listening to me, and she’s not going to stop listening to all of us,” she said. She also jumped to Harris’ defense after a resurfaced video of Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, went viral. 

During an interview with Tucker Carlson, Vance criticized Harris for not having any biological children. He also suggested that women who don’t have kids are unhappy and want to make others suffer. In response, Emhoff took to her Instagram Story and wrote (via NBC News), “How can you be ‘childless’ when you have cutie pie kids like Cole and I? … I love my three parents.”

During a campaign event, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders similarly decided to attack Harris by ignoring Emhoff’s existence and suggesting that the vice president is arrogant because she hasn’t raised any children. Harris responded to Sanders’ remarks on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, expressing her appreciation for her knitting-obsessed stepdaughter and the rest of their close-knit crew. “We have our family by blood, and then we have our family by love, and I have both,” said Harris. “And I consider it to be a real blessing.”