🇰🇷 Jennie

Kim Jennie was born on January 16, 1996, in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province. She moved to New Zealand at age eight, attending school in Auckland for five years, where she became fluent in English; the bilingual register would later become a structural element of BLACKPINK's lyric writing. She returned to Korea at thirteen, joined YG Entertainment as a trainee, and trained for six years before her debut. In her trainee period, she was given the working nickname "YG's princess" by company staff for her rapid mastery of the company's rap-vocal hybrid style.

She debuted with BLACKPINK on August 8, 2016, as the group's main rapper and lead vocalist — the unusual two-role assignment reflecting her capability across both registers. Her rap delivery, marked by a clipped consonant attack and a slightly nasal upper register, became one of the most-imitated vocal styles in fourth-generation K-pop. Within BLACKPINK, her solo verses on tracks like "Boombayah," "DDU-DU DDU-DU," and "Kill This Love" anchored the group's hip-hop register.

Her solo debut single, "SOLO," released in November 2018, was the first solo release by a BLACKPINK member. The track topped the Korean Gaon charts, hit number one on the Billboard World Digital Song Sales chart, and accumulated more than 100 million YouTube views within twenty-three days — the fastest accumulation by any solo K-pop artist at the time. The song was a structural watershed: the K-pop convention prior to "SOLO" had been that group members released solo work primarily during enlistment-driven hiatuses. "SOLO" was released during active group activity, signalling a new model in which member-solo and group careers could run concurrently.

Between 2019 and 2022, Jennie expanded her work into fashion, modelling, and an acting role in HBO's "The Idol" (2023), where she played a backup dancer alongside Lily-Rose Depp and Abel Tesfaye. The HBO project was poorly received critically but raised her US press visibility substantially. Her single "You & Me," released in October 2023, was her second solo release and was followed by collaborations with Matt Champion ("Slow Motion") and Zico ("SPOT!"), the latter topping the Korean Circle digital chart for multiple weeks in 2024.

In late 2023, Jennie founded Odd Atelier (ODD ATELIER), her own management label, while retaining her group contract with YG Entertainment. The dual-label structure followed the same template the other BLACKPINK members adopted — group work with YG, solo work through the owned label — and established Jennie as one of the first major K-pop idols to control her own solo brand from a wholly-owned company.

Her relationship with Chanel had begun in 2017 as a regional ambassadorship; by 2020, she had been promoted to Chanel House Ambassador, the highest tier of the Chanel ambassador hierarchy, joining a small group that included Penélope Cruz and Marion Cotillard. The arrangement positioned Jennie as the public face of Chanel in Asia and increasingly in Anglophone markets, and as of 2026 it remains one of the longest-running Chanel ambassadorships of any active musician.

Her first studio album, "Ruby," released through Odd Atelier in March 2025, was Jennie's first full-length solo project. The lead single "Mantra" charted in multiple regions. The album was Odd Atelier's first major release as a standalone company and was widely watched in the Korean industry as a test of whether an idol could successfully run her own label in parallel with group activity at BLACKPINK's scale.

The Jennie of 2026 is, in the contemporary fashion-and-music conversation, a particular kind of figure: the Korean idol who built a global fashion-house relationship at a level usually reserved for European movie stars, then converted that visibility into a wholly-owned music label. The Korean industry term for what she represents is "all-rounder." The Anglophone music-business term for what she represents is, simply, an early-career test case for what an Asian female pop artist can structurally own.

Her songwriting credits — once limited inside the YG-era group catalogue — expanded substantially through 2024 and 2025. "Mantra," the lead single from "Ruby," was co-written by Jennie with a small Odd Atelier-credited team rather than by the standard YG/Teddy Park production line. The shift in writing credits was watched closely by Korean industry observers: the question of whether a fourth-generation idol could meaningfully share writing credits on her own commercial singles, rather than serve as performer-on-songs-written-elsewhere, was, by 2024, one of the structural authorship questions inside K-pop. Jennie's Odd Atelier credits answered the question in the affirmative.