Fashion lovers went crazy this week when supermodel Bella Hadid (26) made her return to the catwalk after a months-long absence. She laid off all work this spring due to intensive treatment for Lyme disease, so the crowd cheered when she appeared at Milan Fashion Week. But, it turns out, she wasn’t.
“We recognize those iconic cheekbones out of thousands,” wrote Cosmopolitan Wednesday after the show of the Italian brand Diesel. The fashion magazine spoke of a ‘big return’, with Hadid ‘of course stealing the show’. The model was named model of the year in two different elections at the end of last year and then disappeared from the radar due to health problems. So this was quite a moment.
The audience in the room was also aware of this. When ‘Bella’ was the last model to enter the catwalk, a cheer went up that even drowned out the loud music a bit. There she walked, in a black bra top, with a cloth around her head and a long skirt. “Welcome back, Bella,” congratulated Cosmopolitan her. Also Grazia Bella thought she saw. “But we were all wrong.”
Because this was a ‘doppelgänger’, like Vogue calls her. This concerns Canadian Dalton Dubois, who works from London. She made her Fashion Week debut last year at a Burberry show in the British capital, in which the real Bella also walked.
Read on below the post
She felt sexy
Dubois often hears on Instagram that she looks like the supermodel. The choice for her was probably no coincidence, because Diesel is not averse to a stunt. Earlier this year, the brand had models walk around a mountain of 200,000 condom boxes while moaning sounds from porn films blared through the room.
It can feel a bit silly to be used as a gimmick while you also have a career, but Dubois is happy. “I could only laugh,” the model, who also worked for Givenchy and Alexander McQueen, wrote on Instagram. She thanks creative director Glenn Martens: ‘For making myself feel sexy and having the confidence to close your show.’
Hysterical from the pain
The half-Dutch Hadid was forced to disappear from the spotlight in April. She underwent treatment for more than a hundred days for Lyme, an infectious disease that is contracted by the bite of a tick infected with the Borrelia bacteria. For Hadid, the disease has dominated her life since the diagnosis in 2012, but rarely as bad as at the beginning of this year.
She had an infection under a tooth that spread to her jaw, after which the disease attacked her “entire nervous system,” Hadid said. She spoke of the “most horrible pain of my life” that ripped through her entire body. “Every night in the fetal position, hysterical with pain,” she described her life.
Hadid has still not walked on the catwalk. She recently worked in a photo studio again for the first time. In addition to Bella and Gigi Hadid, their half-sister Alana (38) has also recently become active as a catwalk model.
Watch Diesel’s show, with Dalton Dubois from 13:40 minutes:
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