State of Wonder

Becoming a mother changed Hailey Bieber—her routine, her body, her marriage, her inner life. She opens up to Alessandra Codinha about adapting to all of it, looking ahead, and shutting out the noise. Photographed by Mikael Jansson.

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The line begins around the corner. It curls through a hedge and down Melrose, these excited young women in baggy jeans and baby tees, slicked-back center-parted buns, glossy pouts, and perfect, almond-shaped manicures, all patiently waiting for the doors of Rhode’s Los Angeles pop-up to open and let them inside. It is a warm morning in February, and some have been here for hours, hoping to get that much closer to Hailey Bieber, the inspiration behind such beauty crazes as “clean girl,” “vanilla girl,” and “strawberry girl” (the ingestible theme continues with “glazed-donut skin,” “latte makeup,” “brownie-glazed lips,” and “cinnamon-cookie-butter hair”). Around 9,000 people will show up here over the course of six days for Rhode skin creams, face balms, lip glosses (or the ultra-Instagrammable phone-case holders), and more, but really they’ve come for the model turned businesswoman who dreamed them up.

What is it about Hailey Bieber? What makes her fans stop this particular 28-year-old on the street, paint facsimiles of her freckles on their faces, and wait in line to buy her $20 smoothie collab at Erewhon? What drives others to fixate on her flaws in comments sections, or even, she'll tell me later, follow and berate her in the street? For the former, it’s her palpable warmth and kindness, her ’90s-nostalgia-influenced style, her seemingly untampered-with good looks, and her charmed life as the devoted Mrs. Justin Bieber. From what I can tell, after several perilous hours spent online, her dissenters believe she’s successfully executed an evil master plan to entrap their favorite childhood pop star into marriage and keep him from his one true love, which they believe to be his girlfriend from when he was 16, Selena Gomez. As in the case of most celebrity news, or really news in general, the negative version gets disproportionate airtime; disasters and villains sell.