Whether she’s mastering classical piano or modeling for the season’s most memorable campaigns, MALGOSIA BELA can’t help but excel. TINA ISAAC-GOIZÉ meets a model who can’t believe her luck.
In Malgosia Bela’s world, there is no such thing as ‘fashionably late’. Which is why she appears aghast when we meet, exactly 13 minutes past the agreed time.
“I’m always really disciplined. It’s like I’m still in school,” she offers, mid litany of apologies. To this day, says the model, her agent chuckles about the time Bela went to Paris to shoot an advertisement for Gucci Rush. That was in 1999, before cell phones were ubiquitous, and Bela rushed to find a phone booth and call the agency, asking them to ring the studio and warn the team she would be five minutes late. When she got there, she discovered an empty set – the entire crew was yet to arrive. The shoot wrapped after only two hours, but the model hung around until the end of the day, just to be sure. “Given what you’re paid, I thought it was obscene to leave. Maybe I’m naïve, but I prefer it that way,” she shrugs.
Call it naïve, call it discipline – clearly, it works. Jil Sander, Gucci, Lanvin, Chloé and Louis Vuitton all figure on Bela’s 17-year track record, and that’s the shortlist.
This spring, she stars in one of the season’s most memorable campaigns, Frida Giannini’s last ’70s-inspired collection for Gucci (“I felt a little like Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix,” says Bela). Not bad for a 38-year-old model – especially one who never considered herself supermodel material in the first place.
Born Małgorzata – which became Malgosia in America, Margot in Paris and means “nothing exotic, just Margaret” – Bela grew up with two brothers in the picturesque town of Kraków, Poland. Her mother, a professor of English literature, was the intellectual. Her father, an engineer, was a boat-building hobbyist and nature-lover. A top student who excelled at piano, Bela remembers growing up under martial law. “Looking back, I realize that I’m lucky I can remember two realities: the one before the system transformed in 1989, and what came after. I can appreciate things more.”
Dreaming big was not a part of those early years. “I had a sense of duty,” says Bela. “What I realize now, looking back, is that while you think it’s a sort of prison, school is actually total freedom because you’re only responsible for yourself.”
Academics came easily to her. As a high-school senior, she aced a national academic competition (her free-choice essay was a comparative analysis of 19th-century and modern poetry) and placed second in the country, winning her an automatic ‘in’ to the prestigious Jagiellonian University in Kraków. She focused on English literature, with extra hours at the music conservatoire on the side. “I was an [A-grade] pianist, but to go professional you have to be a genius, which I wasn’t,” says Bela. Eventually she became a certified piano teacher, but has never actually taught. “The only test I ever failed, besides my driver’s license, was methodology,” she laughs. “That’s why I gave up trying to teach English to my father, or piano to my son.”
The conservatoire director often told her she should model. “For some people it was obvious,” Bela comments. “But it was never obvious to me. I still think I benefited from someone else’s big mistake, and I just try to do my best.” Her scouting moment came relatively late, just before she turned 21, when she attended a dance performance. “My only image of fashion at the time was [supermodels Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell starring in] George Michael’s Freedom! ’90 music video. For me, fashion was [about] those girls – I did not see myself as one of them. I still don’t, actually. Perhaps it’s because I was raised to think it’s not important what you look like; it’s important what you have in your heart and your head.” She reflects for a minute. “Now, I appreciate good light and a good photographer. But the older I get, the more I’m convinced that it’s not just about bone structure, it is about something that grows from the inside.”
Bela took the agent’s card and showed it to a photographer friend. “He told me I could go to Milan. To Paris. To New York City. And that was it for me. Nothing else existed but New York.” The friend lent her $300 and Bela gave her parents a vague story about going to visit her then-boyfriend in Montreal. They drove her to the airport on her 21st birthday.
Even today, when Bela crosses the Williamsburg Bridge, she gets emotional. “I really felt unleashed,” she explains of her arrival in New York. “No more piano practice. No more studying.” In addition to the $300 loan, she had one contact: a phone number for Next Model Management. “They sent me to 53rd and 1st, and by the time I showed up, I couldn’t get over the fact that I’d spent $40 on a cab. I walked everywhere after that.”
Industry insiders noticed the new girl in town with the immense blue eyes and killer cheekbones, and within weeks, Bela had been cast by Joe McKenna for a Jil Sander campaign. “I had never heard the name in my life before,” she recalls. “So I called my mother and my agent, saying, ‘Is it good? Is it bad? Should I go to Milan? I like New York!’” Soon she was on Concorde, flitting from Hamburg to Milan and back to New York. “I was nervous about the runway. Thank God Jil Sander was always about flat shoes. It was kind of androgynous and anti-supermodel, so that was easier for me.” Bela shot her first cover for Spanish Vogue. She walked in the Comme des Garçons, Givenchy and Balenciaga shows in Paris. Then she became the face of Versace, working with Steven Meisel and an up-and-coming stylist named Carine Roitfeld.
Bela also found a mentor in Richard Avedon. On a friend’s advice, she turned up for her first meeting with the legendary photographer’s book In The American West, figuring that if she didn’t get the job she could always ask for an autograph. “He didn’t like small talk, but he had so many stories,” she recalls. The photographer pushed his protégée to enroll at the Actor’s Studio, and then encouraged her to film (one movie, Ono, premiered at Sundance; another, Karol: A Man Who Became Pope, was a mini-series about Pope John Paul II). The year Avedon died, in 2004, Bela had a son, Józef. She returned to Warsaw to be closer to her family and decided to pursue an MA. She chose American culture as her subject; her thesis was dedicated to Avedon’s entire body of work.
A return to modeling post-baby was not Bela’s priority. She recalls a time in the hospital right after her son’s birth, and catching sight of her face in the mirror. “When I got to New York, I had body issues, I had name issues – I hated my name,” she says, “and now all of a sudden there I was in the hospital and all the little blood vessels in my face had burst completely from the effort [of labor]. My face was kind of purple all over. But I remember thinking, ‘OK, this is how you look now.’ I just accepted it.”
Bela is living proof that you can exist at the epicenter of fashion and still fly under the radar. After she separated from Josef’s father, she moved to Paris and later met her now-husband, who is in fact better known than she. Pre-Bela, Jean-Yves Le Fur, the co-founder of Numéro, co-owner of the hot Paris nightclub Le Montana, and majority owner of the men’s magazine Lui, had been linked to models, heiresses and even royalty. He remembers meeting Bela, the cover model for Numéro’s second issue, in 1999; she never noticed him. When they met again in spring 2013, the timing was right. “I think we were both just looking for something real,” she says.
They married in September that same year, on the private island once owned by Rudolf Nureyev, Li Galli, off the coast of Positano. Kate Moss and Jamie Hince were among the 90 or so guests. Cat Power, Beth Ditto and Sister Sledge played. “It was spectacular; a wonderful gift from my husband,” says Bela, adding that it was Le Fur who brought the fashion crowd; she brought her family. “I would definitely do it again, but smaller this time. And maybe a little more serious.”
As well as her modeling work, Bela has just begun working on an indie film with her old friend Crispin Glover, in which she plays a mysterious 19th-century femme fatale named Veiled Violet. “It’s really fun,” she says. “It is something I’m doing just for the beauty of it – and the costumes are great.” She’s also about to appear in a campaign for the new Ferragamo perfume, Emozione, where she does a turn in a black and white film. “One of the lines is, ‘I am not an illusion, I am a woman.’ For me, that is just really right.”
but this edit for Net-à-Porter is beautiful <3
