From music to motorbikes and modeling, Luna Bijl is a woman of many passions. In the season’s best denim and leather pieces, she talks to Mark Smith about her extraordinary life.
When I arrive at an immaculately tidy house on the end of a terrace on the edge of the small Dutch town of Strijen, Luna Bijl – the 19-year-old model who grew up here among the waterlogged fields and poker-straight bike lanes – is momentarily indisposed. It’s her father, Cees, who welcomes me cheerfully into the kitchen as Bijl, unseen, calls out from the top of the stairs over the blast of a hairdryer: “I am a little bit jetlagged today, sorry!” It’s Saturday, and she has just returned from Los Angeles via New York, where she was photographed for The Edit. An adorable black sheepdog named Diesel is running circles around my feet. He’s the third wheel in a welcoming committee that’s about as far from the normal strictly-vetted, five-star hotel set-up as we are from the catwalks of Paris, where Bijl has walked for the likes of Chanel and Louis Vuitton.
We head outside to a small garden with an inviting-looking paddling pool, where I establish that it is Cees – an industrial insulation engineer who works in the nearby port of Rotterdam – who is responsible for his daughter’s fabulously distinctive first name. Back in the early ’80s, he was a big fan of a Belgian New Wave band called Luna Twist. “People always ask her if it’s a fake name as it sounds so showbiz,” he says, chuckling. “I guess I must have known that she had a future in modeling.”
Moments later, when Bijl – dressed in a black tank and pale blue jeans – slides in opposite me on the picnic table, adjacent to a concrete tortoise, it is immediately apparent why her father had her down as model material. She was scouted incessantly from the age of 11. “I would be going to see a movie with my friends and someone would hand me their card,” she recalls, matter-of-factly.
Understandably, Cees – who separated from Bijl’s mother when his daughter was seven – didn’t want her following up on these enquiries until she was at least 14, at which point she duly signed with a Rotterdam agency and started doing the odd catalogue job. But her heart wasn’t in it. “I didn’t like the whole modeling thing at all at first,” she admits. “I was a real tomboy and I didn’t find myself beautiful – quite the opposite, actually – and I just thought, I don’t think I want to do this.”
But a British fly-on-the-wall documentary series called The Model Agency changed her mind. Filmed inside Premier Model Management – the London agency that shepherded the likes of Naomi Campbell to supermodel status – the 2011 show made headlines for its unromantic portrayal of life as a ‘new face’ in the industry, fraught with grueling, unglamorous travel and frequent, stinging rejection. Still, from their sofa in Strijen, Bijl and her father recognized that Premier, with its impressive contact book and boisterous family dynamic, might just be the ideal launch pad for her. “I thought, here’s a real agency that can get me real jobs,” she recalls. An email was written, Bijl was invited to London, and then signed on the spot by Premier’s co-founder, Carole White. As Bijl puts it: “That was pretty much the best email I’ve ever sent.”
“Luna is a very special model,” White tells me later. “I’d compare her to the classic ’90s supermodels in that she’s got a tremendously beautiful face and she looks fit and healthy – she’s not a stick. There was an enormous amount of interest in her from the word go, and we’ve been very selective with her editorial exposure, to make sure that she only does work of the highest caliber.”
As with all of its most promising charges, Premier played the long game with Luna, fitting bookings around her studies and encouraging her to graduate from high school. “I’m very happy that my career didn’t start until I was 17, because it meant I could enjoy my high school days, have my first kiss, my first boyfriend, all that stuff,” says Bijl. “I went to lots of parties, lots of music gigs, so I don’t feel like I’ve missed out on anything now that I need to put in the hours and dedicate myself to my career.”
White confirms that Bijl’s professionalism – “stoicism” is the word she uses – is another of the many reasons she is so popular with photographers: “Even if she’s tired from traveling, she’ll give her absolute best, and I’ve never – not once – heard her complain about another model. Which is rare, I can tell you!”
Although Bijl has always made friends easily (“I chat to people on trains, on planes, you name it”), her high-school days were marred by bullying after a group of classmates discovered her modeling shots online. “They would create WhatsApp groups just to make fun of my pictures, and they’d call me ‘The Duck,’ because of my weird mouth,” says Bijl. That mouth featured on the cover of Vogue Paris twice last year, so the bullies have well and truly been put in their place.
Quadcross – the off-road motorsport that Cees introduced to Bijl when she was 14 – served as a high-octane haven from the mean girls, and she has recently graduated to two wheels, spending last summer’s precious vacation practicing motocross in Portugal. “I’m not very good at it,” she says, “but I love the adrenaline and the speed and the action – the way you don’t have any choice but to concentrate on what’s in front of you. It’s kind of like walking in a show, actually.”
Another passion is music: Bijl is constantly on the hunt for recommendations of up-and-coming indie bands, and she loves the difference that a great soundtrack can make to the atmosphere of a shoot or a show. “I love everything from reggaeton to New Wave,” she enthuses. When she was 15, a London photographer played a Joy Division album as she posed under the studio lights, and was astonished that Bijl knew Ian Curtis’ every tortured lyric.
Back in the here and now, a cancelled job in Germany on Monday means that Bijl’s suitcase can stay put for a couple more treasured days of normality; she might take her mother’s small boat out for a waterside picnic with friends. She won’t be skippering, though, having learned her lesson last summer when she accidentally dropped the vessel’s keys into the river and had to ask a passerby for help, borrowing his waterproof iPhone to search the murky depths. “Honestly, people have no idea how clumsy I can be,” she laughs, before launching into a tale about how she once managed to crack the bathtub in one of Amsterdam’s fanciest hotels.
As I leave, I notice a framed black-and-white poster in the hallway advertising an early exhibition by a young Anton Corbijn, the Dutch photographer who directed Control, the much lauded film about Bijl’s beloved Joy Division. “He’s also from our tiny town, can you believe it?” says Cees. Maybe there’s something in the water.
