.BellaHadid is a bona fide supermodel in the full flush of her fame, but it is who she is on the inside, when the cameras are down, that she’s ready to reveal to the world.
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.Hadid's demeanor is her armor, she says—a vital layer of protection. Maison Margiela Artisanal designed by John Galliano dress.says.
“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.
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.
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. 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.
“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.
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.