"We’re basically dating now.” A glistening, bathing suit–clad Bella Hadid is towering over the luckiest 12-year-old boy on the planet. He has just spent the last 25 minutes dancing his little heart out to ’80s electronic music with the model of the moment for her Teen Vogue video debut. “You better change your Facebook status,” Bella purrs playfully while hugging her dance partner goodbye. She slips away, leaving her tiny costar helplessly grinning behind Coke-bottle glasses, his red-hot cheeks betraying all attempts at playing it cool.
Unsurprisingly, Bella accurately captures the role of every pubescent kid’s pinup fantasy. After all, she recently scored her first pair of Victoria’s Secret wings and stole the show in them while her brand-new ex, The Weeknd, performed mere inches away. (More on that act of badassery later.) In person, Bella’s face is as painstakingly perfect as the pictures suggest. Her sharp, catlike features, upturned nose, and slanted green eyes make it hard to look away. This enchanting brand of beauty packaged in an Amazonian body makes for a combination that seems to exist only in Tarantino films.
While Bella’s striking physical beauty has certainly helped rack up coveted deals with global powerhouse brands from Dior Beauty to Fendi and Nike, it’s hardly the extent of her intrigue. More impressive is her rare gift to make everyone in her midst feel completely, and utterly, important. She exudes a genuine kindness that, frankly, society says girls this pretty need not possess.
“She has such a beautiful heart. Her insides match her face,” says Jesse Jo Stark, the pop-punk singer and Bella’s bestie of six years. “She’s really this nice to everyone she meets.” It’s clear from Bella’s generous offering of lifetime bragging rights to the boy on set that she aims to please—and in the sincerest way possible.
I flash back to her 20th birthday party, held in the basement of a New York City nightclub. Bella is in a racy metallic see-through dress by Fannie Schiavoni, but instead of dancing on tables like most 20-year-old rock stars, she’s traversing a room that she’s intentionally filled with her real friends from high school, making sure everyone is OK. Call it a classic case of middle-child syndrome, or good home training. I call it the Bella Effect.
Niceties aside, since Bella’s modeling debut in 2013, the former competitive equestrian and ex–Parsons photography student has made quite the name for herself in the fashion world—and among her 10 million-plus Instagram fans. Though she initially entered the public eye as Gigi Hadid’s mysterious, if slightly subversive, raven-haired little sister, it wasn’t long before the Hadid sisters shared equal celebrity recognition. And this good-girl/bad-girl distinction served her well along the way. If Gigi is all-American blonde optimism and bounce on the runway, Bella is more of an exotic, stealth force of nature prowling ahead. (Spoiler alert: They are both universally known as some of the nicest girls in the industry.)
On set, as soon as the cameras stop rolling, the statuesque star is too busy doling out hugs like candy canes at Christmas to bother with feeding the bombshell fantasies that have been flung onto her. She’s just Bella, a genetically blessed Dutch-Palestinian girl from Malibu who is happy as hell to be here and never too cool to let it show.
As the shoot day is winding down, jet lag is setting in thanks to her overnight flight, but Bella is no less solicitous, offering me a lipstick from her purse to try on. She is wearing a fluffy white robe now and getting cozy in her home away from home—the makeup chair. She is finally ready to open up, for the first time, about her public split from Abel Tesfaye, better known as the international pop sensation The Weeknd. But first she wants to talk about another heartbreak, from which she’s still recovering. After an ongoing battle with Lyme disease that derailed her Olympic dreams at age 16, Bella made the tough decision to part ways with her first true love of her life, a horse named Lego.
“I rotated between a few horses that could jump higher or whatever. But Lego was my main, my ride or die,” Bella says wistfully. “When I had to sell him, it was like a breakup! I was really traumatized,” she shares. “You can ask any equestrian: You develop a crazy, emotional connection with this animal. When you’re riding a horse, they have full control over you, and they can literally kill you in a second, so you build a trust with them.”
Listening to her drill down the intensity and nuance of her love for Lego, it’s hard not to miss the metaphor for any hard-charging love and the risk of destruction that invariably comes with it. Which brings us to this past November, when Bella’s high-profile, high-speed relationship with chart-topping crooner The Weeknd came to a halt. The couple had dated for more than a year, and though the parting was amicable, they barely had time to absorb it before being thrust onto a global stage together at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, where she strutted breezily by her ex during his performance of “Starboy.” The moment was affable and sweet—heroic even, considering the guts it takes to face an ex anywhere, let alone in your underwear with the world watching. It played out on social media like a scene from a real-life soap opera, sparking a string of memes with one-liners like “How every girl should walk past their ex!” and “When you’re looking fly AF and secretly hope you run into your ex.”
But Bella admits it wasn’t as easy as it looked. “It was my first breakup — or second, next to the horse — and so public. As an outsider, you might think I handled it so well, but it’s always in your heart, and you always feel it very heavily,” she shares. “It’ll be hard for a while. Love hurts, but you have to pull through.”
Bella pauses reflectively before adding, “But I’ll always respect him, and I’ll always love him. Sometimes you want to be sad about it or handle it differently, but at the end of the day, you never want to burn a bridge that you’ve fought so hard to build.”
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Set Design, Gerard Santos at Streeters. Production, PRODn at Art + Commerce.
