Bella Hadid

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, ...

I always felt that I didn’t have the right to complain, which meant that I didn’t have the right to get help, which was my first problem.” I hate it.” After a few days confined to her apartment, she went to the farm in Pennsylvania and established a daily routine. “I truly respect Judaism, and I think it’s a beautiful religion,” she says. “I think I would have grown into it.” She has been accused of visiting a plastic surgeon with photographs of Carla Bruni, the supermodel and former French first lady to whom she has often been compared. “I wish I had kept the nose of my ancestors,” she says. “I’ve had girls in my lap crying to me at four in the morning, still at fittings for a show when they have to be at another show at 7 a.m.,” she says. 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. The irony is that she turns out to be the star of her generation.” 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. 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. 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.” 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.