Photographs by Steven Meisel. Styling by IB Kamara.
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“Family Is On My Mind”: Bella Hadid On Self-Love, Navigating Megastardom And Meeting Her Cowboy
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At a corner booth at the Ritz Paris, Bella Hadid – now 28, impossibly beautiful, allowably vulnerable – is doing her best. One of the defining fashion models of the 2020s hasn’t sat for a longform interview in some years and the nerves are visibly clanging. Her hands clasp mine. The impromptu hugs are myriad. Her pale green eyes – in turn full of vim, love, hurt, the perma-dew of almost-tears, then actual tears, of course – would be profile-worthy unto themselves. In truth, I’ve never experienced the like. At times, even amid the low bustle of the teatime crowd in the Bar Vendôme, her gaze draws one into a kind of heart-bruising nihilism when, for seconds on end, all life appears to drain from her stare entirely. Then, snap! She’s back – the words tumbling out in long, eloquent sentences, her hypervigilance kicking back in as one ungracious punter casually, grottily, tilts an iPhone her way. There is so much going on in her head, in her life. Yet in terms of going on the record, Hadid is usually compelled by the twin matrices of extreme beauty and modern capitalism to employ the Garbo gambit when it comes to personal comms, perhaps even to survival: zip it.
Today is different, though. Today the American supe, of Palestinian and Dutch descent, says she might feel able to actually talk. She might, in fact – she posits shyly, then a little coyly – like to “say some shit”.
Clearly, she’s in the mood. Outside the hotel, unbeknown to us yet, a crowd of a hundred or so photographers and fans is starting to build. She’s in the city shooting The Beauty (go figure), a semi-mysterious new television series from producer Ryan Murphy based on a 2016 graphic novel, the premise of which is that an STI is doing the rounds that makes its infectees super attractive – but at what cost? (Again, go figure.) Filming out in the streets for the past couple of days, Bella has seemingly been snapped by every pap and fan in town while riding a motorcycle in full crimson leathers, hair slicked back, her leg a lurid Jackson Pollock of fake blood.
Safe to say, the French capital – to say nothing of TikTok – has fully lost its mind. Word is out. Later, she will spend a not inconsiderable amount of time with the throng outside – “I don’t call them fans, I call them friends” – dispensing hugs, waves, smiles and signing autographs against a backdrop of flashbulbs and the occasional Palestinian flag.
Yet Bella is not one thing. There are also stretches of isolation, when, stalked by Lyme disease and depression, among other ailments, her shaky mental and physical health reduce her extreme openness to a trickle. Friends and family manage these lows by texting her the phrase “Proof of life?” and she’ll respond with a word, perhaps a single emoji, because, laid up in bed at home in Texas, or on her farm in Pennsylvania, or in some sprawling suite in some fashion capital, that’s all she has to give. Yet there are also times – such as these hopeful, spring days in mid-April – when her energy can appear to lift an entire city.
Smiling, she dives into her burgundy suede bucket bag to retrieve a journal. We’re going to get to the bottom of things! She is full of apologies. Naturally, this meet-up wasn’t our first scheduled. There were enough shelved plans and lost flights that I spent more time talking to Vogue’s travel agent than my mother last week. But then you meet her and it all makes sense. Hadid is genuinely not super well. She is also extremely funny, camp, mercurial, naughty and electric: “I hate that, it’s my worst nightmare, I’m going to cry,” she apologises for all her cancelling. Then, with pristine timing: “I’ll give you a blow job on the side!” she says, outrageously lampooning the comic audacity of chronic people pleasers. This, you realise, is a woman who knows how to laugh at herself. We both start cracking up. “Just close your eyes!” she quips.
She produces the journal with a flourish. As diaries go, it has quite the aura, as if wrought a century ago, bound in a heavy, masculine hide. So different, yet complementary somehow, to the butter-soft, barrel-wide Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello trousers she is wearing, also in brown leather, rounded off with a cap-sleeved top, a pair of sculptural golden earrings and her beloved tight pony. “My boyfriend made it for me,” she says of the journal, showing me where Adan Banuelos – a horseman of international repute, a cowboy no less – etched the cover for her with hot metal, to give her a home for her thoughts. “It was a very sweet gift,” she says, “but it’s almost done. When I write, I write write write,” she explains, flicking through its pages filled with notes on everything from Orebella, the exquisite perfume line she launched last year and which she is bringing to the UK this month, to her musings on politics, love and self-worth. At times the handwriting is measured and aesthetic, at others pure chicken scratch.
This, in a sense, is the thrust of it. “If you have questions you want to ask, do – and then, most likely because of my ADHD brain, we will be going into so many different directions. I am going to be talking for hours,” she says, smiling theatrically, laughing-yet-serious. I’d warrant Bella would surprise most people in person. Aside from her social media fans (who get occasional glimpses of her chatterbox playfulness) many imagine her as fashion’s arbiter of lethal frostiness. It figures. Seeing her on a runway – an increasingly rare phenomenon – is a one-walk retort to that dreary old question: “But what do models actually do?” “This!” I thought, jaw on the floor this past March, as I watched Bella make her singular fashion month appearance at the Saint Laurent show in Paris. In a well-received show of extreme proportions and intense colour, amid dozens of other models, she emerged into the mix thrumming with hypnotic focus; her eye contact fixed on a distant galaxy only she is privy to; no play, all power. I couldn’t stop looking at her. No one can.
Her view, however? “Did I walk with a limp?” she asks, worried. She’d been exhausted. “I went to Rome and then I went to YSL and then I went to Venice to shoot [The Beauty], then I went back home. I showed my horses, which is still a 4am start. It’s funny because even my agent, Joseph, thinks I have time off. Little does he know the scheduling is still full on. And my boyfriend is a horse trainer, so his schedule is out of control. He is riding 60 horses a day.”
Ah yes, Texas. Bella, then 26, made the move in 2023, years into the peak of her modelling career. Her success had been achieved alongside a Lyme disease diagnosis in 2012, and more than a decade on, true burnout finally came. Her mother, Yolanda, and brother, Anwar, also have the condition, which can result in extreme fatigue, brain fog, joint pain and other symptoms that make getting out of bed a mission in itself. Depression, anxiety, ADHD, endometriosis, PMDD, PCOS and other ailments continue to haunt her. And with them the unfair stinger: guilt.
“There are days that I felt down on myself for being so sensitive,” she says. “For apologising so much, or saying thank you so much, or whatever the things are that sometimes people make fun of me for where I’m overcompensating.” She pauses. “I think nobody really understands chronic illness. Everything feels…” She pauses again. “It’s hard to take a shower most days, which I promise guys,” she adds, smiling wanly as she leans into my recorder, “if you’re reading this, I shower every day. But sometimes, if I have one day off, if I can get in the shower and make myself breakfast, I see that as an accomplishment. Our interview today was at 3pm. I was in excruciating pain until 11am and had a very tough morning.” She exhales. “Can you make this all sound a little bit prettier and less dramatic?”
When it comes to work, it’s the standard issue 14-hour days required in fashion and film. “And so I have to push myself, but the aftermath of me pushing myself gets really bad. And then people see me on the other side, and it’s all: ‘Oh, my God, she’s this or she’s that,’” she says of a certain pocket of social media toxicity that pegs her as a flake when she dares to crack a smile. “I’m back in therapy working on my confidence and my self-love issues,” she says, and cites her move to Texas – with her eight horses, a routine, friends, the man she loves – as a balm.
Naturally, the fashion world was riveted when a 21st-century catwalk queen upsticked for the Lone Star State. It was two years ago and she was at a low ebb, alone and rattling around at the farm she owns with Yolanda and her sister, Gigi, in Pennsylvania. “My mom was already building a house with my stepdad in Texas. They were like: ‘OK, we’re not going to leave you by yourself.’ At the time I was a 26-year-old living with her mom on our farm that I also pay for, feeling a full tiny baby child,” she says. “They were basically like: ‘Just come. You can ride, sleep, tap out. You just can’t be alone.’
“So I go,” she says. “I’m with my stepdad. We move cows, we’re on trail rides, and I’m starting to feel a little better, but just still dealing with my own stuff. Then, the next day, I meet my boyfriend.” Talk about fate. What were your first impressions? “I saw him walk in and it was like a gust of fresh air,” she says. The pair had ended up at a horse show in the local town. “So he basically came in, walked into the exhibit hall, which is where we do all of the show stuff. I was getting a cowboy hat fitted. I just saw him and I was like that’s the…” she trails off for a second, as one does in such circumstances. “I always wanted the cowboy,” she continues, laughing. “And he’s pretty gorgeous, let me tell you something.”
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They didn’t get to talking right away, yet the frisson was undeniable – there’s a reason they set Hallmark movies in small communities. Banuelos, unaware of her fame, would later tell her: “I never knew who you were until I saw your face for the first time.” “For me, that was such a breath of fresh air,” says Hadid. She’s so proud of him. “He’s the youngest Mexican cowboy to ever be inducted into the Hall of Fame.” But it’s the everyday stuff she really adores. “He works for his family, he works for his customers and he works to hopefully build a home and a family one day.”
Is that on her mind too? “Family is on my mind,” she says. “I can’t wait to be a mom. I think that I’m somebody for a lot of people, but in the real intimate way of being the person that somebody can count on consistently, that will change my life for me. And I cannot wait. I never grew up being like, ‘Oh, I have this vision of marriage.’ I have this vision of being a mother. But it’s got to a point where I’m like: ‘You know what? That’s something that’s for me.’ I think that would make me truly happy.” She absolutely dotes on her niece, Gigi’s four-year-old daughter Khai. “Khai is the best thing since sliced bread,” says Bella with a flourish, her smile lighting up the room. “I want to be the best auntie to her. My sister is a superhero.”
In the meantime, her search for balance continues. In positive news, her heart now senses its North Star. “Our biggest dream is to have a summer camp for children. Being in a relationship – he works so much, I work so much – we come together to have these conversations. He knows my passion is philanthropy. I think that’s where I struggle being in this world of so much stimulation,” she says of the interface of fashion and celebrity. “I always feel overstimulated and I wish I could just be somewhere helping everybody. I think I would wake up in the morning feeling better every day if I could wake up for somebody else, and not for something that meant that I was in a photograph or for me to make more money. I wish I could just be somebody for somebody else.”
Hadid and Banuelos are great supporters of Path International (Professional Association of Therapeutic Horsemanship), who they also volunteer with. “Horses are my therapy generally,” says Bella simply – and the documented benefits of formalised equine therapy have been shown to have a potentially beneficial impact on a range of conditions from PTSD to autism. Path is also a named beneficiary of Orebella. Naturally, with her 61 million (and counting) Instagram followers, to say nothing of a vice-like grip on the shopping habits of 14- to 40-year-olds, startup proposals have been flooding Hadid’s way for years. It wasn’t until last year, however, that she brought her most considered project to market: a range of four scents, alcohol-free, packed with essential oils and – as Hadid now demonstrates, by whipping out a heavy, sculptural bottle of Salted Muse and massaging the crisp, peppery elixir into my forearm – a far more earthy and soulful take than the typical celebrity perfume.
Yasmine Diba, Hadid’s best friend since meeting on their first day of eighth grade in 2009, knows her as well as anybody. She now helps craft the dreamy, immersive imagery and video for Orebella as a film director and image maker, and marvels at how her friend works tirelessly at the brand – “on every Zoom, shaping every decision”. She acknowledges that Hadid – like we all do – has to look after herself: “I would say I see Bella is happiest when she’s around the people she loves; when she’s in nature and with animals, her horses, her dog. That’s when I see her feeling her best. And she’s especially happy when she’s around her niece, which is super sweet.
“I think one of Bella’s best qualities is everyone in the room gets treated the same. I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve been out with [her] and people just open up to her like crazy. Whether it’s in Texas or she’s at work, she’s the same. It speaks volumes about how pure she is.”
The full Orebella range will launch in Selfridges this month (Hadid is a fan of bricks-and-mortar retail). “I told [my business partners] from the beginning, I’m not going to do this unless I can give, again, my friends – fans – an opportunity to spend their hard-earned money on something that I’ve made, that they can have on their countertop that looks like art, that they’re proud to buy. Not just like a little tiny square bottle, that’s cute, just to throw to the side, whatever it is. I wanted it to mean something.”
She’s always been on the hunt for meaning. After a childhood spent mostly barefoot in Malibu, living with her former model and reality star mother, Yolanda, with weekends for her property developer father, Mohamed, for a moment she found it studying photography at Parsons. Gigi had made a splash in modelling by that point and soon the agencies came calling for Bella too, so she left school and got a de facto education from the photographic masters of fashion instead. Vogue covers with Meisel, W shoots with Mert and Marcus, soon she was booking campaigns by the dozen. It is industry lore that few worked harder than Bella in those first years; fewer loved the clothes as much; even fewer had her level of taste.
But, yes, there was a cost. It’s clear to anyone who spends 30 seconds with Hadid that her heart is unusually generous and self-sabotagingly open. It renders her extremely kind, to say nothing of being Marilyn Monroe-level charismatic, but you do worry. Still, she’s nothing if not an empath. “Being a young girl in the world today, or a boy, or anybody, it’s hard to look in the mirror in the morning if you don’t feel confident – and when you’re young you’re like: ‘I don’t like this, I don’t like that.’ But then you grow into your 20s and you find people who you love and you find your style. You find a fragrance that makes you feel like you, and everything starts kind of coming together.” This is not an experience Hadid shared. “I didn’t get that whole fluid thing going through. I was like 17, 18 years old not knowing or loving myself a hundred per cent yet. I had just moved out of my parents’ house and gone straight into a world where you have to stare in the mirror every single day. And we get our periods. You’re shooting Victoria’s Secret on your period, with endo. That should be illegal. I’m going to talk to the White House about it, because we should literally ban women working on the week of their period. And the week before, to be honest.
“But, beyond that, just being a human being and having to look in the mirror every single day, I think it really does something to your self-confidence and to your soul. That’s why I say the girl who’s at work is Belinda. And then the minute that I get home, I’m on the couch, that’s just Bella again. Because Belinda just does her job. She slays. She can be crying from 5am to 7am but by the time she gets to work, a smile’s on her face and she’s going to do her job and get through it. That’s Belinda for me. I get emotional thinking about it, because it’s like I have put on that alter ego for a very long time. It’s almost a mask because when I get home I am just a depletion. I’m a skeleton.”
How’s your relationship with the mirror now? “I hate the bitch,” she whispers softly. You hate that bitch? “Well…”
A rare silence falls over proceedings as Bella’s face wobbles with emotion. “There was this picture of me a couple years ago. I had just got my eyebrows bleached and I was wearing a white tank top and these little blue, I think Juicy, sweats and, well, it was just a bad picture. But little do people know I had just gotten treatment and I was pale in the face, no make-up on, not thinking there were any paps, still smiling and still happy. But the fact that people can comment on something like that: ‘Oh, she is on drugs, she’s getting this done, she’s on whatever…’ I’m like: ‘Can’t you look at that girl and just think, “Wow, she actually looks sick?”’ Because I look at that picture now and I feel so sorry for myself.”
For the record, she says she had one nose job, at 14, which she somewhat regrets as she would have been interested to see how her “ancestral nose” grew in. “Then I think back to other moments where I was working for a jewellery company in Venice years ago, or doing a magazine cover, and I can tell exactly on each image the emotion I felt. Which day I cried, which day I felt pain. I went up to someone a couple weeks ago and was like, ‘I’m so sorry for that shoot that we did in Puglia.’ And she’s like: ‘What are you talking about? It was the best shoot.’ Little did she know I was crying behind the set after every shot. But I guess I covered up well enough.”
Here there is the temptation to ascribe irony where there is none: to marvel at the fact that one of the world’s most celebrated beauties feels all but unable to look in the mirror. Yet does it rather make sad and total sense? “I’ve never felt extremely deserving of the things that I have in my life,” says Bella. “And I’ve been so beyond privileged.” Even her personal love of fashion has waned a touch lately. One of the most influentially stylish women in the world, she has an archivist’s knowledge and zeal, and is in possession of an 80-crate trove, including important ’80s Westwood and primo ’90s Gaultier. “I just don’t get dressed anymore,” she says, a tad disingenuously. She’s tempted to sell it all nevertheless, and feigns good-natured annoyance that Vogue beat her to it with our recent vintage sales in New York and London.
Today, her passions steer more to global politics. Her father, Mohamed, who moved to the US in the late ’80s, was born in Nazareth in 1948, six months after the State of Israel was proclaimed. “I wish people would give me a little bit of grace to understand how I deal with things; they will always know that Palestine for me is the fullness of my heart,” Bella says today. She is wary of her words when the tape recorder is on, burned by discourse, and often by guilt that she doesn’t “speak up enough”. (Despite such self-chastisement, in a thorny media climate few in her industries, fewer still with her platforms, have said or posted more.)
“I want to say though,” she says, “so I have it down, religion being equivalised to a government system I think is detrimental to all people involved.” Later, post-interview, amid the hum of camera phones outside, a woman will ask Bella about her feelings on the war in a clip hundreds of thousands watch online. “Children must be safe and happy to live the lives they want, always making sure that mothers and fathers are always able to keep their families safe through any diabolical things,” Bella says, clutching a Palestinian flag to her chest. “We are people on the Earth and we are obviously for the rest of our lives going to strive for peace.”
Her life can be complicated, though. “My throat chakra feels closed,” she tells me of never being quite able to voice all of her thoughts. Oh, that elusive balance. “For me, going through severe depression and Lyme and anxiety and work, and then going home and not having a lot of time to recap, then horse showing, it’s just a lot altogether.” She takes a moment. “I saw something the other day and it made me cry, because I cry for everything. I was scrolling and it was this girl and she’s like: ‘I’m 30 years old and I just don’t know what my path is supposed to be. I don’t know what the universe or God’s biggest plan is for me.’
“I think that’s where I struggle, being able to understand where I belong. Because when it comes to my philanthropy, to Palestine, to my horses, to work, and then my family and my friends, all of these are separated in multiple different countries. To be my singular self, I don’t know how to be in all of those places. I know it means I need to find love within. I know it means I need to be at home within myself, but I’m such a people person.” A final, knowing, somewhat sad, certainly amused, smile plays upon her lips. “I’m such a people pleaser.”
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Cover look: silk crepe dress, Saint Laurent By Anthony Vaccarello. White gold and diamond earrings, Chopard. Bangles, Alexis Bittar, Camille Surault And Dinosaur Designs. Hair: Guido. Make-up: Pat McGrath. Nails: Jin Soon Choi. Colourist: Lena Ott. Production: PRODn at Art & Commerce. Digital artwork: Gloss.
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