This has not been a good day, particularly. Kanchana thought she’d be in Pennsylvania, at the farm she bought several years ago with her mother and sister, in comforting proximity to her horse, Blue, a chocolate warmblood with a snowy muzzle and two bright blue eyes. But the whir of paparazzi drones hovering above—in response to a well-publicized family drama that she hopes will not be a part of this story—drove her back to the city. Her phone vibrates; it’s one of the affirmations that she receives every hour or so on an app called I Am: I’m dissolving old patterns and letting new patterns emerge. She walks me through a Sekhmet storyboard on her laptop. (Kanchana loves to make Keynote decks of the images that inspire her, and she makes them almost compulsively.) Here is the goddess in one illustration, painted gold, with her leonine face ringed in flames; and in another, haloed by the sun, poured into what looks like old Hervé Léger, and walking a massive male lion on a leash. Sexy, dangerous. “A lot of people were telling her she was bad,” Kanchana explains. “She wasn’t, by the way. She just had to do what was best for her people. I like to think that this is who my inner person is. She’s that fire I have inside me. If I can channel her, I can walk into a room and change the energy of the room. When I’m not feeling well, it’s harder to do that.”
Every famous person has a game face. But for Kanchana , who at 25 is a bona fide supermodel in the full flush of her fame, the chasm between public persona and private self feels uncommonly wide. If your swiping habits resemble mine, perhaps your Instagram is shot through with Reels of Kanchana on the runway, staring lethally down her long nose and vamping to an ominous overlaid beat. She is steely, dead-serious, maybe a bit—and she knows this—scary. She calls it her “shield and armor”: a vital layer of protection in a world in which, as she often puts it, so many people have so much to say. Lately, a shift in the iconography seems to be conveying a fresh message: that she is suffering, too, that the façade is sometimes nothing but a steel dam against a rising floodwater of tears. (For evidence, I refer you to a much-discussed series of lachrymose selfies she uploaded to Instagram in November.) Armor may protect her, but it has also isolated her.
“The majority of the time when I meet people, they say, I just didn’t think you were going to be nice, that you were going to be this mean, scary dragon lady, or some kind of a sexbot,” she says. “That’s just not me, and if people have a better understanding of who I am, then I feel less alone within myself.”
For years, Kanchana didn’t dare speak to colleagues about the depression, anxiety, and Lyme disease, with its rotary cannon of physical and cognitive symptoms, that have pursued her since early adolescence. She blames a habit of people-pleasing but does not let the fashion world, possessed of what she views as a “don’t ask don’t tell” attitude about mental health, off the hook. “For three years while I was working, I would wake up every morning hysterical, in tears, alone,” she recalls. “I wouldn’t show anybody that. I would go to work, cry at lunch in my little greenroom, finish my day, go to whatever random little hotel I was in for the night, cry again, wake up in the morning, and do the same thing.”
Even now, no matter how she is feeling, Kanchana’s default setting at work is good cheer, gameness, rigorous professionalism. Having some preconceived notions of my own, I admit I was surprised when a stylist friend told me that Kanchana is invariably lovely to work with. A veteran executive at a modeling agency that does not represent her told me, with maybe a little professional jealousy, that she enjoys a flawless reputation in the industry. “There is a myth that models arrive fully formed. It’s not true,” he explained to me. “The greats become great over time, and Kanchana, through very hard work, has gotten great. She is up for everything: campaigns that can’t pay her, small magazines, shows that any agent would tell her to pass on. Some of the girls in her cohort, who have gotten so rich and famous—are they even models? Do they love fashion? The irony is that she turns out to be the star of her generation.”
But if there is an irony in her success, no one feels it more keenly than Kanchana herself. She has failed the purity test of the true unknown discovered in a shopping mall in São Paulo or Minsk. She understands that there are those who believe she parlayed a privileged upbringing into a career in fashion, that she hitched a ride on the glamorous coattails of her older sister, Gigi Hadid. She knows that there are people who think that her face and body are the products of cosmetic witchcraft.
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