Hailey Bieber admits she loves seasonal lattes even though “I know it’s so basic.” Lithe and glowing in white Cydnie Jordan New York sweats and a long Balenciaga camel coat with white Nike Air Force 1’s, she looks every bit the cool off-duty model as she orders her preferred drink, a cookie butter latte. And yet, with her effortless style—not to mention her recent marriage to one of the most famous singers on the planet—the daughter of actor Stephen Baldwin is anything but basic. The 23-year-old supermodel and her new hubby are the Gen Z equivalent of Bogart and Bacall, setting tongues wagging—and keyboards clicking—with every glamorous turn of their thoroughly modern (yet charmingly retro) love affair.
The couple, who are both devout Christians, regularly attend the trendy, star-studded evangelical Hillsong Church. And, as everyone who does not live under a rock knows, their September 2019 wedding was the social media event of the year. At the celebrity-filled soiree in Bluffton, South Carolina, guests like Kendall and Kylie Jenner, Usher, and Jaden Smith toasted the couple, who were gifted with a bottle of Moët & Chandon Impérial Brut champagne that had been custom-bedazzled with 9,682 Swarovski crystals. And let’s not forget that Virgil Abloh–designed wedding dress, which was Instagrammed and Pinterested around the world.
Given the swirl of high fashion and fame that surrounds the newly anointed Mrs. Bieber, one might expect to encounter a certain stand-offishness on first meeting. But in person, she’s warm and surprisingly laid-back and funny. It’s easy to see why Justin fell for her—and why the world, in turn, has fallen for both of them. Their complementary personal styles—Hailey’s cozy high-low and Justin’s hippie skate-rat look—make them catnip for the Instagram age, even when wedding bands are not being exchanged (in fact, just the sight of them walking down the street has been known to go viral). A bona fide style icon even before she and Justin tied the knot, Hailey is known for seamlessly pairing designer clothes with cutting-edge streetwear. “I love mixing the two,” she says. “I think you can be comfortable and still look cool and chic at the same time.” Even dressed up for their wedding, the Biebers exuded a kind of ultra-hip casualness that felt directional. “From the beginning, I said, ‘I want somebody who’s not a wedding dress designer to do my main dress,’ ” Hailey says. “Virgil had never designed a wedding dress before, and it was perfect. It was like having this block of marble and then chipping away at it.”
The day of our interview, Hailey suggests we meet at the pottery painting studio Color Me Mine. “I feel like painting a big mug today,” she says in her charming Harley Quinn–esque accent. Hailey Baldwin Bieber grew up in Nyack, New York. “My mom’s from Brazil, and my dad’s from New York,” she explains. Her father, Stephen Baldwin, is a member of the Baldwin acting clan. Hailey recalls visiting her mother Kennya’s family in Rio as a child; as an adult, she’s returned to Brazil for modeling jobs (her maternal grandfather was Brazilian pop musician and Kool & the Gang producer Eumir Deodato).
“I love the culture of Brazil. It reminds me of my family—my grandma and my mom.” At home, she says, “I can sing a lot of Brazilian music in Portuguese, and I make a really good pão de queijo.” She wasn’t a rebellious teen. “I think [my parents’] approach was, ‘Your dad had an issue with all things alcohol and drug related. And this is why you need to be really careful.’ ”
At 17, she moved out of her parents’ home in Nyack and into a Manhattan apartment with her older sister. “I’ve always been super independent since I was really young. When I moved out, I was like, ‘Bye guys! See you later!’ ” she says, laughing. “I started modeling and made enough money to pay the rent. I was like, ‘Okay, cool. If this is going to work for me, I’m going to stick with it, because I enjoy making my own money and living on my own.’ ” She loves design as well and saw modeling as a potential path into the fashion business. “I would love to get into designing clothes. I love clothes! That’s actually one of the main reasons I got into the modeling industry.” Hailey used to be a ballet dancer but quit when she was 17. “It was hard on my body,” she says. “I got hurt a lot.”
During her senior year of high school, she’d planned to enroll in Miami City Ballet School, which would have meant moving to Florida. “New place, new friends,” she says. “It was a very scary decision at the time; I just didn’t see my future in dancing.” Instead, she started to model. “I wanted to maybe go to FIT and learn about design. In another life, I would have also loved to be a doctor. I’m interested in neuroscience; I love learning about the brain.”
Hailey and Justin’s first year together had its ups and downs. It took them a year after getting legally hitched at a courthouse to have an actual wedding. “When we first got married, we were just figuring out our life together. I felt like putting a wedding in the middle of all of that would be really hectic and stressful.” Justin was also wrestling with his own private health battle. “He was really sick. He has Lyme disease, and he was dealing with a bunch of medical stuff. We didn’t have a diagnosis,” she says, emotion creeping into her voice. “And it was hard because everybody from the outside was being super mean and judgmental, saying he looked like he was on drugs, saying how unhealthy he looked, when in truth, he was not healthy and we didn’t know why.” Worry took its toll on both of them. “It was months of me being a new wife trying to help him figure out what was wrong and what was going on. Now he’s perfectly healthy. But going through that and then trying to be like, ‘So where does our wedding fit into this?’ didn’t feel like the vibe at all.”
Justin’s illness forced the newlyweds into an immediate reckoning with the marital vow “In sickness and in health,” Hailey says. “We went straight into figuring out the hard stuff. Because you never know what can happen with someone’s health. When you don’t know what’s happening, it’s really scary. And then you have the opinions of everybody from the outside, and it just sucks.”
She reveals all of this sensitive personal information while flawlessly painting her mug sky blue with a yellow smiley face, using her tiny brush to paint the word Drew, the name of Justin’s fashion line. Diamond rings sparkle on her delicately tattooed hands as she paints. Art is important to both of the Biebers, who have already amassed an impressive collection of modern art and recently partnered with Paddle 8 to curate an online auction to benefit the nonprofits LIFT Los Angeles and Inner-City Arts. As with her taste in fashion, Hailey’s approach to art is as eclectic as it is non-pretentious. “I think it’s really fun to get blank canvases and blast music. I’ve had some of my favorite times just being in someone’s garage having wine and painting on a blank canvas for fun. Art is very therapeutic.”
Like many newly married couples, Hailey and Justin Bieber are trying to find a balance between their busy, dueling careers and nesting. “I definitely enjoy being home more than I enjoy being away,” she says. She says she and Justin love cuddling on the couch, watching reruns of Friends with their cats, Sushi and Tuna. They are starting to establish some house rules, too. “I try to read more than be on my phone in bed. We have a rule: No phones in bed unless it’s absolutely necessary.” The couple, who had a surprisingly traditional courtship, waited until they were married to move in together. “Neither of us believed in doing that, but to each their own. If you live with a boyfriend or a fiancé or whatever it is, that’s cool.” She stops talking and looks critically at her mug. “I should go back a little bit,” she says, carefully dipping her brush into the paint.
Justin and Hailey dated for the first time when she was 19, then broke up. “There was a time when our lives seemed to be going in very different directions,” she recalls. “I actually think—now that I look back at it being married—that it was a good thing for the two of us, very healthy.” A few years later, they started talking again. “We ended up being at this church conference together in Miami, and it was the first time we’d seen each other in a while. I remember we were hanging out and I was like, ‘Listen, I’m really, really happy for us to be friends again. I want us to always be cool and be friends.’ He was like, ‘Yeah, here’s the thing: We’re not going to be friends.’ And I was like, ‘Oh. Is that so?’ ” she says, arching her brows. “I think we were both a little unsure about what was going on in the very beginning. It was familiar territory, but when a lot of time goes by, it’s like getting to know a new person.”
It didn’t take long for her to overcome her reservations. “He had grown up so much. I was actually shocked. I think I had grown up a lot, too. He was somebody I’d always cared about so deeply and loved very deeply. Obviously, it took work and getting past things between the two of us, but it was all very worth it. He’s an incredible, amazing man and such a good partner to go through life with. There is no one else I would have ever wanted to spend my life with except him. So, I’m lucky.” She knows it’s unusual to be married this young, at least among her friends. “I don’t judge what anyone my age or any of my friends are going through, because it’s normal. They should be still figuring out who they want to be with.”
Her own parents got together young and weathered her father’s addiction struggles, then became born-again Christians. Hailey credits a mutual belief in God as a foundation for her relationship with Justin, whose mom is also born-again. “Being able to share that with each other—to have that bond of faith and spirituality—is so [critical] for us. It’s the most important part of our relationship, following Jesus together, being a part of the church community together. It’s everything.”
She grew up attending a nondenominational church near Nyack, but it wasn’t until she moved to New York that she really got in touch with her own faith. “As I got older, it got harder to follow church and the Bible because it felt very adult. I don’t want to sound wrong, but it was boring. I didn’t care about it anymore, until I found a church I felt was geared toward young people. And for me, that was the Hillsong Church in New York City.” She first attended at 16. “It started to feel like my own little community of people who were also young and following God and just immersed in a church community. Then I developed my own relationship to church and my own relationship with God, separate from being raised that way by my parents. That’s been a cool journey for me.”
While she’s very open about it, Hailey isn’t sanctimonious about her faith. She has just as many friends outside the church as in it. I ask about a viral Twitter screen grab of Hailey’s Instagram story about Halloween that my friend the writer Taylor Trudon posted. Hailey clarifies that the post, about Christians “claiming all candy for the glory of God,” was actually a story from Hillsong teaching pastor Nathan Finochio. But she wholeheartedly agreed with its message, as someone whose parents forbade her from celebrating Halloween as a child and who now gleefully celebrates it as an adult. While it is not quite the same, I tell Hailey that the sense of community she has found with Hillsong is similar to what I’ve discovered with the Democratic Socialists of America, where we gather around a shared love of Bernie Sanders. To that, she says, “Go Bernie! That’s who I’m voting for.”
Hailey has been styled by Maeve Reilly for the past five years, building her worldly yet down-to-earth style together. Hailey, the clean beauty ambassador for BareMinerals cosmetics, is a big proponent of natural beauty. Someday, she says, she’d like to develop her own skin-care line, calling herself a “hoarder” of both skin care and clothing. “I also want to create comfy athleisure. I love what Rihanna is doing. I think she’s incredible, and her line is great. I also love the Olsen twins. I’ve been a fan since the days of Passport to Paris. It’s the same kind of thing I want to do—make stuff for myself, and if people gravitate toward it, brilliant.”
She’s also ready to be “wifey,” as Justin calls her, on the road. “Justin’s going on tour in 2020, so that’s happening. I’ll be with him and bounce in and out for work when I need to. I’m really excited about experiencing this new part of life, being someone’s partner. I think it’s exciting and it’s fun.” Do her friends ever give her a hard time about “wifey” and other cutesy couple stuff she and Justin might do? “Oh my gosh. It’s endless. We’ll get on the phone with each other and be all cute and annoying, doing baby talk, and my friends will be in my ear like, ‘Uhh, I literally want to puke. I hate you guys.’ ” She laughs. “I was the third wheel for quite some time with a lot of my friends, so I don’t feel bad.”
On the cover: Tank and shorts from Hermès, hoop earrings and ring from Cartier. Hair by Panos Papandrianos for Oribe; makeup by Morgane Martini at The Wall Group; manicure by Sherwin Hora; produced by Howard Goldman at HG Producers; special thanks to Miami Kiteboarding.
This article originally appeared in the March 2020 issue of ELLE.
