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Sekhmet, in Egyptian mythology, was the goddess of war, of the hot desert sun, of chaos and pestilence and its opposite, healing. Terrifying to her enemies, promising righteous retribution to her friends—especially the pharaohs—Sekhmet kept the ancient world’s generative and destructive forces in balance.
“She’s me on a good day,” Bella Hadid says. Her phone sits open on the kitchen table, and an illustration of Sekhmet, fangs and nails bared and dragging a bloody axe, serves as its home screen. She moved into this apartment, a vast downtown Manhattan sanctuary whose giant windows give onto layers of skyscrapers to the north, early last year. It was a splurge of a rental, she admits. A week after she arrived, she was burning sage to rid the space of any lingering negative energy, and the fire alarm went off. “My neighbors were like, You’re burning the building down already? I was like, I’m just sage-ing!” To the west, the Hudson River gives off a languorous midday sparkle. A beach bum at heart, Bella felt she needed to see at least a sliver of water. “You always look up and you’re like, if only I lived in that apartment I’d be happy. That’s how I felt about this apartment. Does that mean I didn’t cry this morning before you got here?”
This has not been a good day, particularly. Bella thought she’d be in Pennsylvania, at the farm she bought several years ago with her mother and sister, in comforting proximity to her horse, Blue, a chocolate warmblood with a snowy muzzle and two bright blue eyes. But the whir of paparazzi drones hovering above—in response to a well-publicized family drama that she hopes will not be a part of this story—drove her back to the city. Her phone vibrates; it’s one of the affirmations that she receives every hour or so on an app called I Am: I’m dissolving old patterns and letting new patterns emerge. She walks me through a Sekhmet storyboard on her laptop. (Bella loves to make Keynote decks of the images that inspire her, and she makes them almost compulsively.) Here is the goddess in one illustration, painted gold, with her leonine face ringed in flames; and in another, haloed by the sun, poured into what looks like old Hervé Léger, and walking a massive male lion on a leash. Sexy, dangerous. “A lot of people were telling her she was bad,” Bella explains. “She wasn’t, by the way. She just had to do what was best for her people. I like to think that this is who my inner person is. She’s that fire I have inside me. If I can channel her, I can walk into a room and change the energy of the room. When I’m not feeling well, it’s harder to do that.”
Every famous person has a game face. But for Bella Hadid, who at 25 is a bona fide supermodel in the full flush of her fame, the chasm between public persona and private self feels uncommonly wide. If your swiping habits resemble mine, perhaps your Instagram is shot through with Reels of Bella on the runway, staring lethally down her long nose and vamping to an ominous overlaid beat. She is steely, dead-serious, maybe a bit—and she knows this—scary. She calls it her “shield and armor”: a vital layer of protection in a world in which, as she often puts it, so many people have so much to say. Lately, a shift in the iconography seems to be conveying a fresh message: that she is suffering, too, that the façade is sometimes nothing but a steel dam against a rising floodwater of tears. (For evidence, I refer you to a much-discussed series of lachrymose selfies she uploaded to Instagram in November.) Armor may protect her, but it has also isolated her.
“The majority of the time when I meet people, they say, I just didn’t think you were going to be nice, that you were going to be this mean, scary dragon lady, or some kind of a sexbot,” she says. “That’s just not me, and if people have a better understanding of who I am, then I feel less alone within myself.”
For years, Bella didn’t dare speak to colleagues about the depression, anxiety, and Lyme disease, with its rotary cannon of physical and cognitive symptoms, that have pursued her since early adolescence. She blames a habit of people-pleasing but does not let the fashion world, possessed of what she views as a “don’t ask don’t tell” attitude about mental health, off the hook. “For three years while I was working, I would wake up every morning hysterical, in tears, alone,” she recalls. “I wouldn’t show anybody that. I would go to work, cry at lunch in my little greenroom, finish my day, go to whatever random little hotel I was in for the night, cry again, wake up in the morning, and do the same thing.”
Even now, no matter how she is feeling, Bella’s default setting at work is good cheer, gameness, rigorous professionalism. Having some preconceived notions of my own, I admit I was surprised when a stylist friend told me that Bella is invariably lovely to work with. A veteran executive at a modeling agency that does not represent her told me, with maybe a little professional jealousy, that she enjoys a flawless reputation in the industry. “There is a myth that models arrive fully formed. It’s not true,” he explained to me. “The greats become great over time, and Bella, through very hard work, has gotten great. She is up for everything: campaigns that can’t pay her, small magazines, shows that any agent would tell her to pass on. Some of the girls in her cohort, who have gotten so rich and famous—are they even models? Do they love fashion? The irony is that she turns out to be the star of her generation.”
But if there is an irony in her success, no one feels it more keenly than Bella herself. She has failed the purity test of the true unknown discovered in a shopping mall in São Paulo or Minsk. She understands that there are those who believe she parlayed a privileged upbringing into a career in fashion, that she hitched a ride on the glamorous coattails of her older sister, Gigi Hadid. She knows that there are people who think that her face and body are the products of cosmetic witchcraft.
“I was the uglier sister. I was the brunette. I wasn’t as cool as Gigi, not as outgoing,” she recalls. “That’s really what people said about me. And unfortunately when you get told things so many times, you do just believe it. I always ask myself, how did a girl with incredible insecurities, anxiety, depression, body-image issues, eating issues, who hates to be touched, who has intense social anxiety—what was I doing getting into this business? But over the years I became a good actress. I put on a very smiley face, or a very strong face. I always felt like I had something to prove. People can say anything about how I look, about how I talk, about how I act. But in seven years I never missed a job, canceled a job, was late to a job. No one can ever say that I don’t work my ass off.”
Isabella Khair Hadid was born at Georgetown Hospital in Washington, D.C., with her eyes open, not crying. Her mother, the Dutch-born former model Yolanda Hadid, likes to say that she came out of the womb holding a cigarette and a martini. Her father is Mohamed Hadid, a Palestinian who fled to Syria with his parents during the war in 1948 before settling in the D.C. area. He took architecture classes at MIT and became a real estate developer, mainly in Beverly Hills, where the family moved when Bella was a toddler. Her parents separated when she was three, and Bella, Gigi, and their younger brother, Anwar, were raised in Santa Barbara. They relocated to Malibu when Bella was in the seventh grade.
Bella says that on account of multiple childhood traumas, about which she prefers to say no more, she does not remember broad swaths of her early years. She finds this somewhat embarrassing. But she remembers riding horses as soon as she could walk. She remembers a relaxed country life in Santa Barbara, removed from the glitz of Montecito. Yolanda insisted that she make her bed every morning. Likewise, she explains that the Malibu she inhabited was by and large a hippie surfer hamlet, not a gold chain of billionaire beach houses. At 14, she got a job at SunLife, a juice shop in Point Dume, paying $7 an hour. “It’s not to say that I didn’t have a very privileged upbringing,” she explains. “But my parents are immigrants who came here and worked for everything they had. I always knew the value of a dollar.” She had a thing for clothes, however: Betsey Johnson, vintage tees, Levi’s, plaid shirts. Did she borrow a friend’s Alaïa dress for prom? Sure. But every second Sunday of the month, she drove to the Rose Bowl flea market to thrift.
“The majority of the time, were we even wearing shoes at school? I don’t know, because you walk down and you’re having science class on Zuma Beach, looking at birds,” Bella explains. “It was that vibe.” After school she hung out with friends in the skate park or the parking lot at Pavilions supermarket, wearing black eyeliner and listening to Mac DeMarco. She and Gigi and their friend Alana appointed themselves managers of the boys’ basketball team at Malibu High School; Alana and Bella flirted with the players on the bus while Gigi, who took it seriously, noted down all the stats after games.
She did not grow up in the mansions that her developer father built. She recalls that weekends spent in these houses, destined to be sold for great sums, felt like a “borrowed life”; her room never had any of her clothing, never a single stuffed animal. Mohamed Hadid, whose career in real estate has been marked by big highs and lows, is perhaps best known for an ill-fated Bel-Air palace dubbed the Starship Enterprise by its neighbors, with a planned 70-seat IMAX theater and a host of features that were never permitted by the city. In 2017, he pleaded no contest to misdemeanor charges stemming from zoning-law violations and was sentenced to fines and community service. Bella feels close to her father, though they do not see each other frequently. “My dad didn’t grow up with a lot at all, so to be very grand with everything he does—this was his way to make his father in heaven proud,” she explains. “At that age I didn’t understand it. I just knew that being in his houses wasn’t super comfortable for me.”
In 2011, Yolanda Hadid married the composer and music producer David Foster, and, in newly lavish circumstances, she spent several seasons as a series regular on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, perhaps most famous for her home’s walk-in refrigerator. (Hadid and Foster separated in 2015.) Bella says that she never watched the show: “My sister and I would hide upstairs every time they were filming.” Her passions were riding and taking pictures—growing up, she was never without her camera—and she had a plan: She would go to the University of San Francisco, get an apartment with her best friend, Yasmin, and become a photographer. “The girls on the other side of L.A.—it was about a platform Louboutin and an Hermès bag. I thought to myself, I could never ask my parents for that. If I asked, I wouldn’t get it. But I wouldn’t ask. Who am I at 16 to carry around a Birkin?”
In eighth grade, Bella began having a mix of physical and psychiatric symptoms, including brain fog, anxiety, exhaustion, poor focus, headaches, bone pain, and crying spells—some of which may have emanated from Lyme disease, from which her mother and brother also suffer. She has also been diagnosed with babesiosis, a tick-borne parasitic infection of red blood cells that sometimes co-occurs with Lyme. In her teenage years, as her mother was exploring holistic medicine for her own disease, Bella started receiving ultraviolet-light irradiation of her blood and ozone therapy—two unproven alternative treatments for inflammatory conditions such as Lyme—as well as hyperbaric oxygen therapy, another adjunctive treatment for Lyme. At 20, she was diagnosed with hypothyroidism and started on hormone replacement. She also says she experiences adrenal fatigue, a term that refers to a cluster of nonspecific symptoms that some contend represents a deficit in cortisol production caused by chronic stress.
When Bella was in high school, a psychiatrist prescribed extended-release Adderall for her inattention, thinking it might simply be ADHD. She says that the appetite-suppressant effect of stimulant medication pushed her into anorexia. “I was on this calorie-counting app, which was like the devil to me,” she remembers. “I’d pack my little lunch with my three raspberries, my celery stick. I was just trying, I realize now, to feel in control of myself when I felt so out of control of everything else.” These days Bella has a very healthy relationship with food, but she says the dysmorphic feelings persist. “I can barely look in the mirror to this day because of that period in my life.”
The next time I see Bella, it’s early January in Los Angeles, and she is in bright spirits. She celebrated a low-key New Year’s Eve at home with her boyfriend of nearly two years, Marc Kalman, a New York–based art director. Bella made them gyros, and they watched the ball drop on TV. She has worked hard to keep her relationship private. “I think that’s why things have been able to last,” she says, implicitly contrasting it with her highly public but doomed relationship with The Weeknd. “When you give other people room to have opinions on things that are so personal to you, it poisons it.”
She is in L.A. for a panel discussion with Jen Batchelor, her partner in Kin Euphorics, the line of nonalcoholic, adaptogenic drinks she is busy building. (Bella didn’t create Kin, but she was so taken with the products herself that she built one of her decks and presented it to Ari Emanuel, CEO of Endeavor, IMG’s parent company, who then pitched Bella to the brand.) She is also here to visit the clinic of Daniel Amen, M.D., a psychiatrist who uses SPECT scans to gauge the degree of blood flow in certain regions of the brain. He has told her, based on previous scans, that her frontal lobe has been asleep for the last eight years. Better blood flow, she hopes, will mean less brain fog. (Amen is a polarizing figure in the field of psychiatry, having built his business around interventions that some say lack a robust, peer-reviewed evidence base.)
Bella is wearing the kind of model-off-duty look that has made her something of an icon of street style in recent years. It’s a recherché Y2K hype-girl thing, with key vintage pieces, or something intentionally off—say, a fuzzy animal-print bucket hat—that works because she’s Bella Hadid. Today it’s a pair of vintage Roberto Cavalli trousers in a raver print, white socks, her beloved Comme des Garçons x Doc Martens leather oxfords, a tight black Christophe Lemaire top, an old wooden Yves Saint Laurent amulet necklace, and a forgotten Prada bag from 2004.
“I dress like a little boy,” she suggests. “You couldn’t catch me in a dress willingly at this point in my life.” These days, she is very, very into fashion. Racks and racks of clothing in New York and at the farm are a testament to her deep love of Jean Paul Gaultier, her study of Vivienne Westwood, her collector’s eye for old Hermès, Celine, Versace, Mugler, her sneaker addiction—though she insists she wears almost none of it, since she rarely leaves the house. Her outlet of choice is Depop, the online resale platform, where it gives her joy to check in on her rating. “I don’t know if anybody knows it’s me, but it’s always like, very sweet buyer! Awesome buyer!” she says. Often self-deprecating in conversation, Bella takes open pride in her style. “I’m dead-on. I know what I like. I always have, since I was young. And I’ve never drifted.” She knows she has influence, too. “I look outside and I see a hundred people dressed exactly like me, just because of what Instagram is.”
Bella moved to New York for college at Parsons, where she planned to study photography. But she had already signed with IMG by the time classes started, and as Parsons’s photo department increasingly went digital, she found herself learning more about the craft from fashion photographers like Mario Sorrenti. “On set everybody laughs at me,” she says, “because I’m going around asking people about the lights, or why some photographer liked to shoot on a Hasselblad, or how the art director decided on the character he wanted me to be. I look like I might be micromanaging, but what’s happening is I am production, I am creative, I’m figuring out what hair and makeup are doing, I’m helping with styling. I love to be a part of that process. Sometimes I think I love everything except being in front of the camera.” Bella recently presented Pop magazine with a series of decks for which she did all the styling and art direction; the magazine turned them into a trio of fall cover stories. She says she’d like to run her own fashion magazine one day. Or maybe become a glassblower. Or a criminal psychologist.
“Working with Bella takes me back to when we started working with Gisele,” says Michael Kors, who first met the younger Hadid sister backstage at his spring 2017 show. Making the turn on her opening pass, wearing a black dress and very high heels, Bella rolled her ankle and wiped out. No one helped her up, but she dusted herself off with such cool aplomb that Kors likely would never have known if he hadn’t heard another model compliment her backstage. “Gisele would redo things over and over again, because she wanted things to be great. It was an era where you were there to roll up your sleeves and get the work done. Bella is the same way. She’s smart, she’s collaborative. She’s got a sense of silliness and hard work in balance. And she’s kind to everyone—not just me—which is a big deal. I’ve worked with people who might be lovely to me, but are they lovely to everyone on the team? No. But I think that’s how she approaches the world.”
In addition to Kors, Bella has done major campaigns for Fendi, Jean Paul Gaultier, Dior makeup, Burberry, and Versace, among others, and she is a new member of the VS Collective, Victoria’s Secret’s rebranding effort in the wake of revelations about an alleged culture of harassment at the company. She feels that while fashion has benefited from a collective reckoning, the work is far from over. In the frenzy before the shows, models need breaks to eat, to sleep. “I’ve had girls in my lap crying to me at four in the morning, still at fittings for a show when they have to be at another show at 7 a.m.,” she says. “Completely destroyed, hair burned off, haven’t eaten anything, exhausted to the point where they’re shaking. Finally girls are standing up about sample sizes, but when I first started seven years ago, I couldn’t fit into Saint Laurent. And I remember a stylist talking about my weight because I couldn’t zip up. Looking back, I think, yeah, because a Saint Laurent sample size from the runway was just not a real size for anybody. But then you think there’s something wrong with you, and no one around you is saying, no, no, you’re fine, don’t worry, it’s a small size. They’re kind of just looking at you like”—she smirks—“I guess we’re going to have to put something else on. And you’re thinking, I guess it’s me then.”
When Bella was 14, she had a nose job. It’s a decision she regrets. “I wish I had kept the nose of my ancestors,” she says. “I think I would have grown into it.” She has been accused of visiting a plastic surgeon with photographs of Carla Bruni, the supermodel and former French first lady to whom she has often been compared. She has been accused of getting her eyes lifted, her jaw shaved, her lips filled. She says that none of this is true. “People think I fully fucked with my face because of one picture of me as a teenager looking puffy. I’m pretty sure you don’t look the same now as you did at 13, right? I have never used filler. Let’s just put an end to that. I have no issue with it, but it’s not for me. Whoever thinks I’ve gotten my eyes lifted or whatever it’s called—it’s face tape! The oldest trick in the book. I’ve had this impostor syndrome where people made me feel like I didn’t deserve any of this. People always have something to say, but what I have to say is, I’ve always been misunderstood in my industry and by the people around me.”
In January 2021, Bella had what she calls a burnout. Her mood changed. She wasn’t herself. “My immediate trauma response is people-pleasing,” she explains. “It literally makes me sick to my stomach if I leave somewhere and someone is unhappy with me, so I always go above and beyond, but the issue with that is that I get home and I don’t have enough for myself. I became manic. I bleached my hair. I looked like a troll doll. Then I dyed it—it looked like a sunrise. That should have been the first sign.” Under a great deal of professional pressure and after weeks of waking up in nearly suicidal despair, she spent two and a half weeks at a treatment program in Tennessee. She added the two mainstays of Western psychiatry, talk therapy and medication, to her otherwise holistic regimen. These have changed her life. Wellbutrin dialed down her depression, tightened the faucet of tears, and made the myriad demands of her career more bearable. Therapy, she says, is the biggest gift she has ever given herself. “For so long, I didn’t know what I was crying about. I always felt so lucky, and that would get me even more down on myself. There were people online saying, You live this amazing life. So then how can I complain? I always felt that I didn’t have the right to complain, which meant that I didn’t have the right to get help, which was my first problem.”
For Gigi Hadid—the logical one, according to Bella—the wish to intercede has always been tempered by a sense that her younger sister has to be permitted to do things her way, which has sometimes meant to the point of near-collapse. “It was always really hard, and it still is sometimes, to feel like I could help my sister in her moments of darkness or pain,” Gigi says. “I think it’s always a journey with loved ones, and we’ve gotten better about not assuming the other knows what we need or want. Bella leads with her heart, and that’s beautiful, but you learn the hard way to guard yourself. Most people, myself included, build at least a small wall, after you feel vulnerable in these often unusual life situations. It seems to me like Bella does not—or she only puts up one brick at a time. During fashion month, for example. Even if it leads to feeling essentially emotionally burnt out, Bella spends every day backstage, in fittings, with fans, doing it all with the most energy and love, while the rest of us are zombies. Because I know that she’s sometimes internally struggling in the midst of all the flashing lights, the big sister in me wants to be protective. But I also know that that’s the magic of Bella.”
Even without the benefit of her sister’s watchful eye, it’s hard to imagine a person with a more expansive repertoire of palliatives. In addition to medication, supplements, psychotherapy, cryotherapy, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, vitamin IVs, muscle testing, meditation, and The Artist’s Way, Bella has a lively spiritual practice, which includes channeling angels and chakra balancing. While her family wasn’t religious, she grew up surrounded by the Jewish traditions of her friends and godparents, and she has an interest in Islam, her father’s faith. “I’m very spiritual, and I find that I connect with every religion,” she says. “There’s that my-way-is-the-right-way thing in human nature, but for me it’s not about my god or your god. I kind of just call on whoever is willing to be there for me.”
In May of last year, during the most violent conflict between Israel and Gaza in years, Bella shared videos of herself at a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. The nation of Israel, tweeting from its official account, suggested that she was effectively calling for the abolition of the Jewish state. This is an accusation that pains her deeply. “I truly respect Judaism, and I think it’s a beautiful religion,” she says. “This is about a government system suppressing people. After that happened, I spent days miserable in my own thoughts, trying to write everything down. And it always just felt like I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t. I would never want anyone not to be able to have a place that they feel is their home. But I feel that Palestinians deserve the same. It’s a big conundrum.”
For much of last year, Bella had been feeling better. And then, on the first morning of New York Fashion Week last September, she woke up and began to cry before her eyes even opened. She had already been working 15 days straight and, by her estimate, 350 days a year for the past seven years, and on that day she had eight fittings and three shows. For the first time in her career, she backed out of her commitments. And once again, people had things to say. Though she believes that she had no choice—that her ragged nervous system could not have survived another fashion cycle—she was tormented with guilt. She deleted her Instagram. “I don’t have FOMO for parties or going out,” she says. “I have FOMO for work. If I say no to something and someone else does it, that’s hard for me. I hate it.” After a few days confined to her apartment, she went to the farm in Pennsylvania and established a daily routine. She woke up, made a smoothie, wrote in her journal, rode her horse, had lunch with her mom, visited with her sister and her niece. “When you are forced to be perfect every day, in every picture, you start to look at yourself and need to see perfection at all times, and it’s just not possible,” Bella says. “That month off was really helpful for me.”
This year, Bella plans to say no more often. She will have to: She is busy with product development, can design, sustainability initiatives, marketing, and rollouts for Kin, and she will be designing a capsule collection for a beloved label, which she can’t announce just yet.
“To have to wake up every morning with this brain—it’s not cute,” she says, giving her skull a knock-knock. “So now everything that I do in my personal life is literally to make sure that my mental state stays above water. Fashion can make you or break you. And if it makes you, you have to make a conscious effort every day for it not to break you. There’s always a bit of grief in love.”
In this story: hair, Jawara; makeup, Kanako Takase for Addiction Beauty and Yumi Lee.
Interior Photos: Yumi Lee; Exterior Photos: Kanako.