10 Christmas Outfit Suggestions

 Bella From the Heart: On Health Struggles, Happiness, and Everything In Between

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, and 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, and 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 them. 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, or was late to a job. No one can ever say that I don’t work my ass off.”