Now is the time to snap up the exciting new pieces that will ensure your look is on point. One of fashion’s favorite faces, model JULIA HAFSTROM, showcases the season’s most wanted. By EMMA SELLS.
“I was a platform diver for a long time. It was exciting, doing crazy stuff in the air and landing in the water. I did a few competitions but I never liked them. I just wanted to do it for myself.” Dressed in a sweater, skinny jeans and flat boots, Julia Hafstrom’s porcelain skin is peppered with freckles and makeup-free. “I never wear makeup when I’m not working,” she says. “I honestly don’t know how to do it; no one taught me, and why should I start now?”
The Swedish model is beautiful but unimposing. Though, of course, her red hair (dyed light blond prior to The EDIT’s shoot; now dyed back to her signature hue) makes her stand out. Inherited from her father, she was teased about her hair color while growing up, but says she wouldn’t feel like herself without it. Indeed, it has become her modeling hallmark along with those cut-glass cheekbones; on camera, it is positively arresting.
Hafstrom began modeling aged 14, when she was scouted in a branch of another of Sweden’s famous exports, Ikea. Her big break came three years later, in 2009, when she was handpicked to star in Prada’s fall campaign by photographer Steven Meisel who, in the same weekend, shot her for Vogue Italia. Since then, Hafstrom has walked for everyone from Louis Vuitton to Stella McCartney, regularly popped up in campaigns for Tommy Hilfiger, appeared in the Gucci pre-fall 2015 campaign (the first overseen by ground-breaking Creative Director Alessandro Michele) and is currently sitting very pretty in Models.com’s list of Top 50 Models.
Her success has not been hard fought; Hafstrom has been working consistently ever since she started, doing jobs that she enjoys, without having to deal with the celebrity pressure of some of her more well-known counterparts. But Hafstrom’s good fortune hasn’t made her into diva. After we finish, she is going home to make vegetable soup before heading out into the sunshine. “I walk a lot,” she says. “It’s very soothing. If I have the opportunity to walk to work or take a car, I’ll always choose to walk, even if it’s an hour away.”
Hafstrom has lived in New York, and in her Lower East Side apartment, for five and a half years, long enough that it now feels like home. Yet even when she arrived as a 17-year- old, she found settling in easy. “I’ve always been pretty independent. When we were kids my mother worked, so [my siblings and I] did a lot by ourselves,” she says. “And I met good people as soon as I got [to New York]. They’re still my friends today, my support system.”
Modeling, on the other hand, took a little more getting used to. “The hardest thing was learning not to care, especially in front of the camera,” she says. “I would feel so awkward. You just have to let it go and not think about it.” The same goes for the always-last- minute nature of the job, which means Hafstrom rarely knows what she’s doing tomorrow – both the best and the worst thing about it.
For now, she wants to continue modeling “for as long as she finds it interesting”, then do something that involves working with people – perhaps teaching kindergarten. There is still plenty of time to fulfill her dreams, although she is already considered a fashion veteran at the ripe old age of 23. “I would rather be old than new,” she says. “Experience is nice in life. I’ve become more confident, I’m secure in myself, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.”