There is something quietly radical about a woman who has appeared on hundreds of magazine covers, walked the runways of Paris, Milan, and New York, and been photographed by the greatest lensmen in fashion, choosing, at 30, to let the world see her through the eyes of someone who knew her before any of it.
That is the essential premise of Between Us, the visual memoir Bella Hadid is releasing on October 6, 2026, her 30th birthday, through Rizzoli, one of the most prestigious illustrated publishers in the world. But to call it simply a memoir is to undersell what it actually is: an act of reclamation.
The Book Fashion Didn’t Expect
Between Us is not a traditional autobiography. It does not begin with a Hollywood ghost writer and a six-figure deal. It begins, instead, in a PE class in Malibu, where two twelve-year-old girls, one of them the new girl, arriving from Santa Barbara, scanning the room, found each other.
That girl, Yasmine Diba, is the co-creator of this book. An Iranian-American photographer and director now based in Los Angeles, Diba has spent the better part of two decades as Bella’s closest friend, most trusted witness, and, as it turns out, accidental archivist. It was Yasmine who took Bella’s first informal modelling shot. It was Yasmine who was there for the teen parties, the prom nights, the lonely transatlantic flights, the private emotional reckonings that no PR team ever managed.
The 288-page large-format hardcover is built from the material of that intimacy: candid photographs, personal polaroids, unseen images, handwritten notes, and actual text messages between the two women. It reads, by design, less like a coffee table monument and more like someone quietly handed you their childhood memory box.
That is precisely the point.
Bella Hadid: The Woman Behind the Face
To understand why this book matters, you need to understand the particular kind of visibility Bella Hadid has lived inside.
She was born Isabella Khair Hadid on October 9, 1996, the daughter of Palestinian real estate developer Mohamed Hadid and Dutch model Yolanda Hadid. She grew up on a ranch in Santa Barbara alongside her sister Gigi and brother Anwar, a childhood she has described as grounded, animal-loving, and largely removed from the world of fashion her mother once inhabited. As a teenager, her first serious passion was not modelling but equestrian sport, and she harboured genuine Olympic ambitions before her discipline, equitation, was confirmed as non-Olympic.
Then, in 2012, her life shifted in a way that still shapes her today. Bella, her mother, and her brother were all diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease. The illness would become a defining thread of her adult years, one she has spoken about more openly as time has passed, and one that Between Us addresses with what the Rizzoli listing describes as “quiet resilience.” For the Arab world, which has watched Bella also move through public conversations about mental health advocacy, ADHD, and the psychological toll of extreme visibility, this part of her story resonates with particular force.
She began modelling at sixteen. By 2014, she had signed with IMG Models and made her New York Fashion Week debut. By 2016, she was named Model of the Year by GQ and had walked for Dior, Fendi, Versace, Givenchy, and a roll call of houses that reads like a who’s who of fashion history. By 2017, she had broken the record for most Vogue September covers in a single year, five international editions. She has since become a global ambassador for Prada and Chopard, and the first-ever global ambassador for Prada Beauty. In 2024, she launched her fragrance brand, Ôrebella.
But here is the thing, the covers did not show: behind all of it, there was a young woman who enrolled at Parsons School of Design to study photography. Who woke up in the middle of the night with ideas for films and wrote eight pages of plot. Who, by her own account, became so skilled at becoming characters on set that the person underneath occasionally got lost. Who credited, in a recent interview, one person above all others with always bringing her back to herself.
That person was Yasmine Diba.
The Photographer Who Knew Her First
Yasmine Diba is not a celebrity orbiter. She is a working photographer and director of real standing, and her significance in Bella’s life runs deeper than professional collaboration.
When they met, neither of them imagined this life. As Bella recalled in a recent conversation: “I remember when I walked straight into that PE class. I was the new girl coming from Santa Barbara, and I swear, I found the only other Middle Eastern girl sitting on her little square during first period.”
Their friendship has the texture that only shared adolescence can produce, the kind where someone knows how you laughed at fifteen, how you cried at seventeen, what you were afraid of before the world had opinions about you. Diba’s photographs of Hadid carry that knowledge in every frame. They are not styled. They are not optimised. They are anchored, as one piece of writing in the book noted, in proximity, history, and familiarity.
It was Yasmine who shot Bella’s first modelling photographs, informal, unaware of what they were starting. It was Yasmine who photographed the Dazed MENA anniversary cover in 2025, reuniting with Bella for her first regional cover in nearly a decade. And it is Yasmine whose lens structures the entire narrative arc of Between Us, from middle school to the front rows of fashion week, told as what Rizzoli calls “a playful dual narrative,” two women looking back together, neither one edited out of the frame.
What the Book Actually Contains
The physical object itself is worth describing. Between Us arrives as a large-format hardcover on matte-coated stock, with a foil-stamped case and mixed-media layouts that incorporate polaroids, marginalia, and what the publisher calls an “intentionally informal, film-forward design.” It is simultaneously an emotional artifact and a collectible object, the kind of thing that sits differently on a shelf than your average fashion book.
Inside, the content spans the full arc: childhood memories with sister Gigi and mother Yolanda; teen parties and prom night; Bella’s first Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Dazed covers; backstage moments at the shows; campaign work for Yves Saint Laurent, Fendi, and others; lonely transatlantic flights; and the quieter, more personal chapters that most celebrity books politely skip.
Those quieter chapters are what set this apart. Bella’s handwritten captions accompany Yasmine’s images, providing a layer of interiority that no interview or editorial could manufacture. Together, they chronicle what Rizzoli describes as “growing up in the social media era,” which, for someone of Bella’s generation and profile, is not a minor footnote. It is the entire condition of her adult existence: living at scale, under constant scrutiny, in an era when the distance between a private moment and a public image has essentially collapsed.
Why This Matters for the Arab World
For the Arab reader, Between Us carries a dimension that the Western fashion press tends to gloss over.
Bella Hadid is part Palestinian. Her father, Mohamed Hadid, was born in Nazareth. That heritage, and what she has done with the visibility it gives her, is not incidental to her story. At the 77th Cannes Film Festival in 2024, Bella wore a red-and-white keffiyeh dress by New York label Michael & Hushi, a moment that moved far beyond fashion pages and became a statement absorbed across the Arab world. She has spoken consistently about her Palestinian identity, used her platform in moments of global attention, and navigated the particular complexity of being a prominent Arab woman in a Western-dominated industry.
None of this is separate from who she is. And a book that promises to show the woman behind the image, her handwritten notes, her private reckonings, the version of herself that existed before she was anyone’s cover star, is, for this audience, something worth paying attention to.
This is not a book about a supermodel. It is a book about a woman who has been many things to many people, who decided, at thirty, to tell her own story herself, through the eyes of someone who loved her before the story started.
The Meaning of Thirty
There is a reason the publication date is her birthday. Turning thirty, for Bella Hadid, is not a retreat from the industry. It is an arrival. She has her fragrance brand. She has her Prada ambassadorship. She has a creative vision that has expanded well beyond the runway. And now she has this: a 288-page document of how she actually got here.
Between Us is available for pre-order via the Rizzoli website from October 6, 2026, and will be available through international stockists from the same date.
The girl who walked into that PE class and found the only other Middle Eastern girl in the room has, it turns out, been working on this story for seventeen years.
Between Us by Bella Hadid and Yasmine Diba is published by Rizzoli, releasing October 6, 2026.
