Presley Gerber, the model who chose to struggle in public

Presley Gerber spent most of his life being read by strangers before he had said much of anything. The surname arrived first, then the face, then the verdict: another child of fame handed a runway by birthright. What he did with that attention in his final years ran against everything his family had built. His parents had guarded their privacy for decades, while he chose to describe his depression, his medications and his relapses on camera, in his own words, to anyone scrolling past. That choice is the part of his story that will outlast the campaigns.

He was the first child and only son of the supermodel Cindy Crawford and the businessman Rande Gerber, the nightlife entrepreneur who later co-founded the Casamigos tequila brand with George Clooney. He was delivered at home in Brentwood, on the west side of Los Angeles, and even his name came with an anecdote. At a dinner with the record producer David Foster, then married to Linda Thompson, once Elvis Presley‘s girlfriend, Foster asked who could possibly follow Presley, and the name stuck. He grew up in Malibu with his younger sister, Kaia, and parents who kept both children away from interviews for as long as they could.

That arrangement did not last. Gerber signed with IMG Models at 15 and made his runway debut for Moschino at 16, while still a student at Malibu High School, from which he graduated in 2017. Within a few seasons he had walked for Burberry, Dolce & Gabbana and Bottega Veneta, as well as for Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren. Campaigns followed for Celine and Omega, and for Calvin Klein, where in 2018 he shared the frame with his sister. Readers of Models.com voted him the breakout male star of 2017; the site had nominated him in its celebrity-as-model category the year before and nominated him again for male model of the year in 2018.

The most visible job of that period folded his mother’s career into his own. For the 2018 Super Bowl, Pepsi brought Crawford back to restage the commercial she had made for the brand in 1992, and this time her son stood beside her. “We’re a really tight family, so it was just like going to work with one of your friends,” he told People. A year earlier he had appeared in the music video for Madison Beer’s Dead. Later came a lighter credit: in 2024 he and his father played celebrity pickleball against the host Jason Kennedy in an episode of the series The Wager.

The public record also filled up with harder entries. In January 2019 he was charged with driving under the influence, and he later received three years’ probation, a DUI program and two days of community service. In early 2020 he had the word “misunderstood” tattooed beneath his eye, and the internet treated it as a punchline. He answered the mockery on Instagram, at one point comparing it to transphobia. By the summer of 2021 the tattoo was gone.

The easy version of Presley Gerber, repeated for years in comment sections and gossip columns, was the cautionary nepo baby: a young man handed everything who kept wasting it. That version skipped two uncomfortable facts. An industry that signs a fifteen-year-old largely on the strength of a surname bears some responsibility for what fame does to him, and the same audience that rewarded the surname punished every stumble made under it. The tattoo that was mocked as vanity reads, in hindsight, closer to a caption he wrote for himself. His openness deserves scrutiny too. Posting the details of prescriptions, withdrawals and alternative treatments to a large following was a risk in its own right, and some of what he shared, including a video from March 2026 in which he prepared for an ibogaine treatment in Cancún, sat far outside medical consensus. His honesty was real; it was also a young man’s public experiment with no safety net.

What he said, he said plainly. In 2023 he told the Studio 22 podcast that he had struggled with “mental health, depression and some other things that come along with that,” and that “whether I help one person or a hundred people get out of that place that I was in at one point in my life, that’s all I need to do.” He floated the idea of a clothing line built around mental-health awareness and started an Instagram series, “Mental Health Mondays,” in which he walked followers through his own history: a first psychiatrist at around 13, Prozac at 14 for anxiety and panic attacks, Xanax at 16, a first stay in rehab at 18 or 19, and a long sequence of medications he came to distrust.

In June 2026 he appeared beside his parents at a mental-health event in Malibu, his last public appearance. He spoke about a turning point at 23 and about the pressure of growing up watched, and said that being open had left him feeling freer. In an interview in the September issue of American Vogue, Kaia Gerber described what addiction does to a family. “When something like that happens in a family, it kind of levels everyone,” she said, and she called her brother “this absolute teacher” who had decided to be “very human for everyone.”

Gerber died on September 20, 2026, at Resolutions Living, a sober-living facility in Santa Monica, one day after he arrived. He was 27. Santa Monica police said they were investigating the death as a suspected overdose and found no indication of foul play; the Los Angeles County medical examiner deferred a ruling on the cause and manner of death pending further tests. The family, through a representative, asked for privacy. Weeks later George Clooney, his father’s business partner, said he was not yet ready to talk about it.

What remains is smaller than a career and harder to dismiss. The campaigns will date the way all campaigns do. The recordings he made of himself, explaining without polish how a young man with every advantage can still end up back in rehab, will keep reaching the people he said he was making them for.

Tags: fashion, Cindy Crawford, Kaia Gerber, models, Calvin Klein, Presley Gerber

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