24 Hours in the Life of Taylor Hill at Paris Fashion Week Inline
Photo: Courtesy of Vogue / @voguemagazine1/9“My mom always said, life will make sense in the end,” says Taylor Hill on the morning of the penultimate day of Paris Fashion Week. She has just opened and closed Vanessa Seward’s show, wearing well-priced bourgeois suiting. She turned 20 a few days ago, and celebrated with a shopping trip to Saint Laurent (credit card had weekend issues; clothes still to be collected). Wednesday is Miu Miu. Friday is Victoria’s Secret, the regular gig she has had (gleefully) for two years. She has a steady BF who travels with her (yay!), millions of followers on social media, a love of udon and comfy separates, and a geeky Colorado backstory that involves competitive rhythmic gymnastics (“cortortionism”) and the alto sax. Life makes little sense at the moment. Over the next 24 hours, let’s see what unfolds for a deliberately uncool yet totally relevant American in Paris who looks like baby Cindy C. and dreams of becoming Gisele B.
Photo: Courtesy of Vogue / @voguemagazine2/9Like many a top model with a voracious following, Taylor Hill is photographed coming and going from shows, and this means that she now has to have “looks” for her off-catwalk “exits.” This is a change from the 4+ seasons when she was largely unknown and the hair model, the makeup test model, the girl who the clothes were “literally sewn on” yet who often never saw the runway. Success has its perks and its newfound responsibilities. She has had to invest in proper fashion, pronto: “It sounds stupid, but you need it, because this is your job, too.”
“I buy EVERYTHING,” she wants you to know. That said, Hill didn’t have time to shop at the start of this European season and instead packed newish favorites: an oversize leather BF jacket from Acne Studios, shredded jeans by Iro, Chanel combat boots (found on sale at Saks Fifth Avenue; last pair in her size: “It was a sign!”), her “pop of color” red bag from Saint Laurent. There’s a white T-shirt dress from Theory—and a black sweater frock from Acne. Her leather leggings are by Helmut Lang; her backpack 3.1 Phillip Lim. She is nothing if not systematic, realistic, and unsnobby. But who among us doesn’t crave a little glitz? Over at Saint Laurent, Hill has yet to collect her new sunglasses: white frames with gold studs. From VS to Versace, the girl’s gotta bring it. #ItsMyJob
Photo: Courtesy of Vogue / @voguemagazine3/9Taylor Hill has a huge number of virtual pals on social media but only a few close friends. Tonight she is out with one of them, Cindy Bruna (fellow @victoriassecret model and catwalker), for a goofy dinner at the Hôtel Costes. The Costes is a bit of a scene for Hill, who prefers to ask Parisian non-fashion pals to help her find “the really good food, the real Paris.” The Costes, of course, is super Parisian and has really good food, but it is a mad, mad fashion zone this week and Hill defines herself as a “big old nerd” (albeit one in a Jonathan Simkhai lace frock).
This is her inner circle: Bruna, Sara Sampaio, Romee Strijd, Jasmine Tookes, Josephine Skriver, and Stella Maxwell (whom she met at age 15 when Maxwell had super-close-cropped hair). They are all VS-ites and they all started working for the company at about the same time. These girls know to start exercising a month or two before the show (that show, not the runways of Paris and Milan); they know about eating lean protein. Hill, like many young professionals caught up in extraordinary careers of their own making, struggles to find friends “who get what I do for my job” and who also “understand it but don’t talk about it all the time.” Who better to turn to than other VS girls who walk the line between mass and haute?
Hill also retains a couple of close pals from her childhood in Colorado, and knows it is “good and important to have friends outside of fashion.” She took her GED at age 16, but enjoys hearing of her old buddies’ college pursuits. The road not taken isn’t threatening to Taylor Hill, but, rather, fascinating and diverting. Sure, her father, a natural gas engineer, would have preferred she go to university on a music scholarship. “It’s important to have a conversation,” she says, “but also to do what you like.”
Photo: Courtesy of Vogue / @voguemagazine4/9Taylor Hill typically avoids the tourist spots of Paris and aspires to be “part of the city, part of the culture.” But at the end of a long night, and an even longer month, it is hard not to fall for the charms of the Eiffel Tower, that sparkling bauble by night. And it is a great spot to regroup (after a L Oréal Paris party!) and measure the distance she has traveled since being discovered by a Los Angeles–based photographer at age 14, while shooting a Belk catalog in Granby, Colorado. The photographer, who went on to be her “mother agent,” taught her on that day how to fake a step. She was far too skinny for the clothes and had to change looks in a forest. She remembers thinking: “Everything’s not real. The clothes don’t fit. I am not really walking.”
Does she miss Colorado? Well, yes—the natural beauty of it all and her mother’s weekend house, which she and her parents and three siblings would drive to very early on Saturday mornings, to be on the slopes by 8:00. She misses snowboarding and the mountains. “You miss it, but you really miss the idea of it,” she says of that yearning for home. What is she happy to have left behind? “Super-high elevations, really dry air, and really cold.” Bonjour, Paris!
Photo: Courtesy of Vogue / @voguemagazine5/9Dawn in Paris on the last day of collections. Taylor Hill has been in Europe since London, where she walked for Topshop Unique. She is, in a word, pooped and unafraid to show it. She knows from watching her social followers swell in number that her fans “want to see something personal.” She has been known to post grumpy woke-up-like-this shots from Fashion Week days with 3:00 a.m. call times.
Hill avoids “seductive” images because her following is “quite young. I am not embarrassed to be sexy,” she says, speaking of her Victoria’s Secret work, “but you need to be someone who girls look up to, someone who is proud of her body but, in my case, also such a nerd, such a spazz.” Her favorite morning look is “no makeup, in pj’s, eating a bagel.” Bagels are not in the picture in Paris, although, Hill observes, anxiously and longingly, “There is so much bread in Europe . . . bowls of bread . . .”
