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Bella  Hadid life

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.

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COUNTRY GIRL

The Hadid family farm in Pennsylvania has provided a refuge from work and a welcome sense of routine: wake up, make a smoothie, journal, ride her horse. Louis Vuitton dress, bra top, and jeans.

“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.”

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BLUE CRUSH

On set, Hadid is joyfully hands-on. “I’m figuring out what hair and makeup are doing, I’m helping with styling. I love to be a part of that process.” Tom Ford top and skirt. Bulgari earrings and ear cuffs.

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ON FORM

She takes open pride in her sense of style. “I’m dead-on,” she says. “I know what I like. I always have, since I was young. And I’ve never drifted.” Ralph Lauren Collection dress. Emilia Wickstead shoes.

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.

“She leads with her heart, and that’s beautiful,” says Gigi Hadid. “That’s the magic of Bella”

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.”