On Health Struggles, Happiness, and Everything In Between

 

For years, Bella dared not talk to her colleagues about the depression, anxiety and Lyme disease, with its physical and cognitive symptoms, that had plagued her since her early teen years. She blamed her habit of pleasing people but not letting the fashion world, which possesses what she considers a “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude about mental health, being inaccurate. “For three years when I worked, I used to wake up every morning, in tears and alone,” she recalls. “I won’t show it to anyone. I would go to work, cry at lunch in my little green room, end my day, go to any random little hotel I stayed at for the night, cry again, wake up in the morning and do the same thing. ”

Even now, no matter how she’s feeling, Bella’s default setting at work is good cheer, game, and rigorous professionalism. Having some stereotypes about myself, I admit that I was surprised when a stylist friend told me that Bella has always been lovely to work with. A veteran executive at a modeling agency that doesn’t represent her told me, with a touch of professional envy, that she has an impeccable reputation in the industry. “There is a myth that the models are fully formed. It’s not true,” he explained to me. “Great people become great over time, and Bella, through her hard work, became great. She’s ready for anything: campaigns that can’t pay her, small magazines, shows that any agent will ask her to pass. Some of the girls in her group who have become very rich and famous – are they even models? Do they love fashion? The irony is that she turned out to be the star of her generation.”

But if there’s an irony in her success, no one feels it more clearly than Bella herself. She failed the purity test of the unknown actually discovered in a shopping mall in São Paulo or Minsk. She understands that there are those who believe that she has had the privilege of being raised in a fashion career, that she has been riding in the glamorous braids of her older sister Gigi Hadid. She knew that there were people who thought that her face and body were the product of cosmetic enchantment.

In 2011, Yolanda Hadid married composer and music producer David Foster, and under lavish new circumstances, she spent several seasons as a series regular on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, featuring perhaps most famous for her doorless refrigerator. (Hadid and Foster separated in 2015.) Bella says she’s never seen the show: “My sister and I used to hide upstairs when they were filming.” Her passions are horseback riding and photography – growing up, she was never without a camera – and she has a plan: She will go to the University of San Francisco, get an apartment with her best friend, Yasmin, and became a photographer. “The girls on the other side of L.A. — it’s about a Louboutin background and a Hermès bag. I thought to myself, I can never ask my parents for that. If I asked, I wouldn’t understand. But I won’t ask. Who am I at 16 to carry a Birkin? “