WEATHERFORD — Bella Hadid will not be answering questions this afternoon. “I’m just not feeling so well today,” she says in a soft voice, sitting in the passenger seat of a Ram truck and staring out the window at the rolling pasture.
This is awkward, since asking questions of Bella Hadid is what I came to do. The “It Girl” model recently created a sensation riding a horse into New York Fashion Week, her sleek black top unbuttoned into her cleavage, looking the way pop culture always hoped cowgirls would. The event was a promotion for a short documentary about her boyfriend and the equestrian sport of “cutting,” but you’d be forgiven for missing that in the frothy press coverage: Bella wore chaps, Bella wore a Kemo Sabe cowboy hat, Bella changed into a fringed vest, Bella, Bella, Bella.
To be a celebrity is to become a host for the hopes and dreams of strangers, to participate in a fantasy to which you only partly consented. For Hadid, that fantasy has been the story of an uncommonly beautiful woman, with dozens of international Vogue covers under her belt, taking a mental-health break from high fashion and falling for a professional horseman named Adan Banuelos.
The drama began last October with a grainy zoomed-in video of the couple kissing in the Fort Worth Stockyards and by January, she was competing in a national cutting show at Taylor Sheridan’s Bosque Ranch. As a girl, Hadid lived on a California ranch and dreamed of professional riding, but chronic Lyme disease sidelined her, so this twist had the feel of a path righting itself. By March, she was whooping for her man ringside at the American Performance Horseman at Globe Life Field (an event he won). That same month brought news she’d purchased a ranch. “I’m full-time Texas livin’, y’all” read the TMZ headline, a phrase Bella Hadid almost certainly never said. But in the fan-fiction factory of celebrity gossip, this was an irresistible romance: the supermodel and the cowboy.
The allure of that tale is what brought me to Teton Ridge’s TR9 ranch, a bucolic expanse in Weatherford that breeds and trains quarter horses. Teton Ridge produced the short documentary screened at the New York event, which had been such a smash that organizers decided to rope in the Texas press, too. PR alerts were dispatched Sunday afternoon for a Monday event whose lineup included one-on-one interviews with the couple, a post-screening Q&A and horse tricks with Banuelos, which I read hopefully as horse tricks with the supermodel and the cowboy, in which they would dazzle the crowd in the lost art of romance and the Old West.
But the afternoon is hot and sticky. My brief interview takes place in the air-conditioned back seat of a black Ram truck where both parties in this media saga are hiding from the sun. I slide in the back seat, feeling like I’m taking an Uber, and Banuelos, a good-looking guy in a black cowboy hat, turns toward me from the driver’s side with an easy smile, very “yes, ma’am” and “thank you, ma’am,” as his famous girlfriend stares ahead. She glances back at one point, her pale and pretty blue-green eyes locking with mine through the space underneath her headrest.
“I would answer questions if I had it in me, I promise,” she says. “I’m just here as emotional support for Adan.”
Banuelos is a second-generation horseman who became one of the youngest inductees into the National Cutting Horse Association Hall of Fame in 2017. Cutting is the sport of separating a cow from the herd, with horse and rider maneuvering together to keep the animal’s path blocked in the ring, an activity so close to his heart and so far from my own experience that I’m nearly incapacitated to ask questions about it.
“You’re doing a demonstration later?” I ask.
“No, ma’am,” he says. “I hope not.” And my heart sinks, because that means the quiet woman beside him will not be, either. There will be no Bella Hadid making an entrance on a regal stallion, there will be no supermodel and her cowboy locking lips as cameras flash.
Later I would hear secondhand it might have been too hot for the horses, which I sympathized with, though it was head-scratching that horses could make an appearance at a New York fashion show but not an actual ranch.
The evening had originally been planned as a small VIP gathering for friends and family of Banuelos and the Teton Ridge crew, but the guest list kept growing. By sunset, about 200 people are chatting on a grassy expanse strung with Edison bulbs. The fancy New York screening had taken place in a pop-up store for luxury cowboy hats, but at the Texas event, kids who already own cowboy hats take turns roping a calfing dummy, and miniature donkeys make the rounds with saddle bags of beer. I speak with Miss Rodeo Texas, Ashlyn Williams, whose sparkly pink gown brushes on the grass over her pink cowboy boots.
“As Miss Rodeo Texas I have to stay on top of the fashion world, so of course I know of Bella,” she tells me. “When she started cutting, she made it cool.”
Photos: Supermodel Bella Hadid and her equestrian boyfriend Adan Banuelos attend a Texas screening for a short documentary featuring Banuelos
Cool is not a word I’ve always associated with rodeo culture, but the past years changed that. Beyoncé and Post Malone went country, and young women in New York began to dress like Yellowstone extras. Not since the days of Urban Cowboy has Western wear been so trendy, perhaps because it’s an authentically regional look in a world that’s been flattened by technology.
It’s dark when the couple makes a low-key entrance into the crowd. Hadid wears a brown fringe jacket over a black bustier and leather pants, and she eats tacos and giggles beside Banuelos’ uncle Diego on one of the couches set on the grass to watch the 15-minute film, the first installment in a Teton Ridge documentary series called Window to the West.
Banuelos has disappeared from the scene, though. He’s stepped away from the crowd and taken a seat on the darkened grass near a trailer for the horses, as the audience watches his face filling the giant projection screen.
It must be strange to experience life as a cowboy, with all its solitary promise, only to find yourself inside the media circus of celebrity. I asked him about this during our brief interview, how dislocating the attention must feel.
“It’s something I’m not used to, and something she’s had to deal with for a long time,” he says, looking at his girlfriend. He didn’t even know it was New York Fashion Week when they flew up for that event. That’s not his world. “I think about how this was supposed to be an escape for her,” he begins, then pivots. “But she wants me to be successful, and I want people to see this other side of her. How badass she is.”
It also must be strange to experience life as a supermodel, with all its glamorous ennui, only to find yourself inspired by the old-fashioned grit of people you want to turn a spotlight on without accidentally stealing it, or blinding them in the process. So I can’t blame her for not answering any questions, though she does talk at one point.
We’re discussing the double-edged sword of attention. “When God gives you an opportunity, or a platform, you have to take the opportunity,” she says, more to Banuelos than me. “For the animal, or the cowboy in general, or the people who work so hard to make this life.”
Banuelos nods. “God puts opportunities and pressures on people who can handle it,” he says.
After the screening, the crowd lingers under a bright moon, and Hadid poses for one picture after another. She hands off a gift bag someone gave her to Banuelos, who lugs the thing around for the next 30 minutes, a familiar couple’s routine. She looks happy out there, smiling under her cowboy hat, riding the range of audience expectation, as the rest of us scatter to our cars, released from the spell of celebrity and back into our ordinary lives.
CLARIFICATIONS, 4:26 p.m., Sept. 19, 2024: This story has been updated to clarify that Adan Banuelos is a professional horseman and that cutting is an equestrian sport.