How Much Hailey Bieber is Too Much Hailey Bieber?

Hailey Rhode Baldwin Bieber has a lot of haters.

Yet, the self-confessed nepo baby (she famously sported a baby tee emblazoned with the words “Nepo Baby” on a pap-walk at the very peak of the children-of-nepotism discourse)—hadn’t gone out seeking fame at all. 

If anything, despite hailing from the Baldwin clan of Hollywood—her father is actor Stephen Baldwin, the youngest of the four Baldwin brothers – she had a much quieter upbringing in Nyack, New York. 

Which doesn’t, of course, necessarily mean that she wasn’t a celebrity still (at 19, she declared in a W Magazine profile, “Homer is fascinating.”), only that when she first met the 15-year-old Canadian musical sensation Justin Bieber before his 2009 performance on The Today Show—at the behest of Uncle Alec—she was mostly normie-adjacent. An otherwise unremarkable, gawky girl in middle school swooning at the swish of his side-swept tresses to the tune of One Less Lonely Girl. A fan, just like the rest of us!

So, by the time Bieber and Baldwin bonded together again at a New York church service years later, then dated, broke up, got back together, and ultimately sealed their union in holy matrimony, first at a Manhattan courthouse, then following up with a fairy-tale fantasy wedding in South Carolina inspired by The Notebook, his “true” fans – now that they’d finally graduated middle-school – were old enough to feel betrayed. 

Naturally, therefore, what followed was the hate. 

And it was the hate that fueled Hailey.

From the Hatelist to the Wishlist

“On my way to meet the 28-year-old at the Château Marmont,” GQ’s Samuel Hine finds himself “unmistakably in Hailey Bieber’s Los Angeles.” 

The influencer-tastemaker, cosmetic mogul, model, magnate, millionaire and matriarch populates much of the billboards on Sunset Boulevard: “There was Hailey the fashion muse fronting a DKNY campaign; Hailey the celebrity wife and mother standing with Justin and their son, Jack, in a promotion for her husband’s new album; Hailey the influencer toting a giant Chase credit card; Hailey the visionary businesswoman in an ad for her beauty brand, Rhode.”

On Instagram, she is the Gap girl, collaborating, co-creating and showcasing the relaxed ’90s Low-Rise Loose Jean that makes The Cut’s Carol Lee “feel like a full-time ceramicist in the Lower East Side who wears the same thing every day (a white t-shirt and well-tailored, yet loose jeans) and looks chic doing it.” 

On TikTok, when it’s not her $20 Strawberry Glaze Skin Smoothie (prepared from organic strawberries, avocado, dates, almond milk and coconut cream, all enriched with vanilla collagen, hyaluronic acid, and sea moss gel) that’s going viral, it’s her manicures – similarly named after a baker’s assortment of glazed doughnut, strawberry French, vanilla glaze, blueberry milk – that are.

And standing tall above them all is the colossus of Rhode, her middle namesake beauty brand and purveyor of those exhaustingly inescapable peptide lip liners in pastel pinks and earthy beiges that slide seamlessly into the orifice of the Rhode Peptide Lip iPhone Case. 

Not a particularly pleasant arrangement, if you think about it.

Nonetheless, a far cry from when Daily Mail exclusives regularly declared Justin “MISERABLE” in the marriage: “Bieber is seemingly no longer the music-making juggernaut he once was – something both insiders blamed on Hailey.”

The Colossus of Rhode

At the Hollywood studios of OBB Media – the same production powerhouse that launched Justin’s second coming during the COVID-19 pandemic with the Justin Bieber: Seasons docuseries – Mrs. Bieber is sat kneeling with a giant tube of moisturizer, flush-faced, bare-legged, lip balm in hand, her face artfully dotted with gleaming globs of lotion shining celestially under the studio lights.

A vision not entirely dissimilar from that of a goddess.

Coincidentally, Hailey herself was a fan of Greek mythology back in her days of reading Homer, made all the more serendipitous by the fact that her middle name is Rhode, “the sea-nymph daughter of Poseidon, mighty god of the ocean, and a wife of Helios, incandescent god of the sun,” writes GQ.

Today, her ancestral ties to Hollywood royalty and her marriage to music royalty does make her something of a modern-day goddess, a mythical matriarch for millennials and the elder Gen-Z hailing from the hallowed shores of the Hudson river, draped in earthy elevated taupes and beiges and armored with a slicked-back bun and no-makeup makeup, leaving affiliate links to everything in her wake, from Miu Miu to Mango.

Earlier this year, for instance, when she touched down in Sydney for the Australian launch of Rhode, her Magda Butrym cropped trench and Mathieu Blazy Chanel Shopper immediately made the Airport Dressing 101 moodboards. At fashion month, she is a near-permanent fixture, be it in the front row of Saint Laurent, on the runway of Bottega Veneta, or getting into fights with parking attendants in saucy, Matrix-style sunglasses.

Off-duty, her style is more akin to the women she models herself after: she’s a fan of a yassified après-gym ensemble of baggy T-shirt, barely there bike shorts à la Lady Diana, or the severe minimalism of a certain Mrs. Kennedy.

But all of it, from the post-Pilates flush of Rhode-tinted cheeks to the She-EO girl bossery of an oversized Saint Laurent blazer, is part of a carefully curated, endlessly replicable, clean-girl formula. 

You see, Hailey Bieber just doesn’t sell Rhode, she inhabits its world.

Which, of course, makes it all the more aspirational.

Nobody says no to Hailey B.

“I watch too much TV. I am such a binger, it’s crazy,” Bieber tells Interview’s Mel Ottenberg, “I’m watching Love Story right now.”

And like the leading lady of Love Story, Bieber continues to be at the butt-end of salacious speculation – “very ‘Mastermind’ by Taylor Swift,” as Madison Huizinga puts it. Across the internet, compilation clips abound of Hailey looking for Justin in the crowd at events they’re both attending, with the underlying subtext pointing towards her calculated intentions.

Similarly vitriolic is the visual gag, or “swag gap,”between Mr. and Mrs. Bieber, who often attend events like they’re from two separate planets; him in sweatshorts and Crocs, her in slinky mini-dresses and Saint Laurent slingbacks. Is Justin’s grunge-forward garb undermining Hailey’s old-school Hollywood glamor? Or is he simply letting her have the limelight?

What all of this also serves, however, in Hailey’s grander scheme of things, is to make her appear relatable. Her Rhode lip-tint? $20. The Erewhon Smoothie? Also $20. The MagSafe Snap-On iPhone Lip Case? $46. And her Gap Jeans? $89. All priced just enough to feel aspirational, while still remaining affordable, and most importantly, within reach at your local mall.

“Even her marriage speaks to the marketable averageness she engenders,” writes Slate Magazine, “Someone as hot as Bieber is, too, dealing with an aggressively nonchalant man who can’t put on an ironed shirt.”

And while I personally stopped relating to her the moment she said, “I like the humidity because it makes my skin feel so yummy” – no Hailey, it doesn’t – thousands more continue to buy into her low-key, low-maintenance look literally every second—three Rhode products per second, by Sephora statistics.

For someone with two very famous last names, that’s quite the accomplishment, considering Rhode uses neither of them.

So, it’s true that Hailey Bieber may be overexposed. And it’s true that being married to the heartthrob of the generation subjects her to much unfair scrutiny, negative press and more often than not, plain hate. But it’s also true that she can use it to her advantage. As Bieber tells Ottenberg, “I’m just a girl who knows if you want to get something done, you’ve got to go for it.”

“Nobody says no to Hailey B,” she adds.