Cover story for SELF magazine on Hilary Rhoda

As the lifestyle director at SELF magazine, I wrote our December cover story on model Hilary Rhoda, who is, to our mind, a bright star on the fashion scene, a disciplined, clean-living model who treats her body as well as--if not better--than most professional athletes do.

Hilary Rhoda stands barefoot in the middle of her kitchen in downtown New York City, long and lean in gray skinnies and a cozy green sweater. There’s a small smile on her lips as she opens her refrigerator door and reveals a distinctly non-modelesque trove of peanut butter M&M’s, Kit Kats and fudge-covered cookies. “So unhealthy, I know,” she says. “I do have a really big sweet tooth. But I balance it out.”

Rhoda can certainly afford a sweet treat or two. Nearly 10 years after she burst on to the scene as the fresh-faced teen with those eyebrows, it’s her ultra-toned body, arguably the fittest on the high-fashion runways, that’s put the 27-year-old back in the spotlight and at the forefront of a new vanguard of athletic, clean-­living models. “I didn’t start working out to change the way models are viewed or to change the industry,” she says. “I did it for me.”

Whatever her reasons, Rhoda’s transformation from waif to wonder woman—an evolution five years in the making—hasn’t gone unnoticed by industry insiders. “The way people used to know Hilary was for her face. Now she’s got the beauty and she’s got the physicality,” says Kohle Yohannan, co-curator of the Model as Muse exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. Yohannan places Rhoda among an elite group of super fit supermodels—like Gisele, a yoga enthusiast, and Doutzen Kroes, a former speed skater—who are forging change in the industry. “The whole idea of a model type is dissolving and expanding,” says Yohannan. “It’s about time.”

In person, Rhoda’s sculpted form is impressive, as are her luminous skin and bright blue eyes. It’s no wonder she’s frequently asked what she does to look so amazing. The answer: a lot. Aside from her daily sweet fix, Rhoda sticks to a diet chock-full of vegetables and protein, rarely drinks alcohol, downs 4 liters of water daily and gets plenty of sleep. Bedtime is 9 p.m., 10 if she doesn’t have an early call time the next day.

Then there are the workouts: two-hour daily sweat sessions at the Tracy Anderson Method studio (for which Rhoda wakes at 5 a.m., weekends included), plus frequent trips to SoulCycle for Spin classes, often after a long day at a photo shoot. “It’s crazy, I know. But going to the gym is my outlet,” she says. “It’s the best place for me to clear my head and recharge. And it makes me feel better if I’m not having a good day.” Rhoda also walks and rides her bike everywhere she can in the city and in the Hamptons, where she and her fiancé, Sean Avery, a former NHL player, recently completed a renovation on their weekend house. It’s an impressive routine for anyone, let alone an in-demand model with a hectic travel schedule and about a million balls in the air.

But you could say that being active and breathlessly busy are second nature to Rhoda, who grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland, dancing ballet and playing a bevy of sports, among them soccer, basketball, swimming, lacrosse and field hockey. She was determined to keep pace with her brother Spencer, older by just 19 months and now a Manhattan-based real estate agent. “I wanted to be like him and hang out with his friends all the time,” she says. “So I got into sports.”

Still, Rhoda had ambitions beyond playing varsity. As a child, she dreamed of landing a role on All That, a children’s comedy-sketch show that aired on Nickelodeon. “I’d be like, ‘Mom, when are you going to call them?’ I would do little performances at home,” she says. It wasn’t until high school that Rhoda started thinking that maybe all those strangers who stopped her in public to tell her she should be a model were on to something. “They’d say, ‘Oh, she looks like Brooke Shields.’ And I didn’t know who Brooke Shields was!” she says.

At 15, Rhoda attended an open call to meet with modeling scouts in Washington, D.C. Within months she had signed with a New York City agency and was shooting her first campaign for Hollister with Bruce Weber. More jobs followed, which Rhoda scheduled around school vacations until she graduated from high school and, deferring college, moved to New York.

This time around, success wasn’t quite so immediate. Going to New York Fashion Week castings, she didn’t get a single job. The same happened in Milan. “Coming into this industry and getting rejected can hurt your feelings if you don’t understand,” she says. But Rhoda soldiered on to Paris, where she was handpicked by Nicolas Ghesquière to walk in the Balenciaga show, effectively anointing her the new It Girl on the block. After that, “I did every major show in Paris,” she says, beaming at the memory.

http://www.self.com/body/celebrity/2014/11/supermodel-hilary-rhoda-cover-girl/