In partnership with L’IDÉE WOMAN

Taylor Hill has always been the face of glamour.

Eight years ago, she covered RUSSH’s Nightfall issue – strong brows, the full pout and wrapped in the kind of coat that stays with you. I remember staring at the images, wondering how somebody could look so entirely like themselves inside fashion imagery that so often asks women to become abstractions instead.

At the time, Hill existed in that particular category of fashion mythology reserved for the internet’s most recognisable faces – endlessly reposted, endlessly consumed, somehow still elusive.

"My nickname is Tay. My star sign is Pisces ... my friends would describe me as weird," her answers read. There was no performance of mystery. No attempt to intellectualise fashion or inflate ambition into something larger than herself. Even then, she seemed more interested in instinct than image.

Now, we’re backstage ahead of the L’IDÉE WOMAN show, speaking somewhere between fittings, rehearsals and a flight she boarded less than 24 hours ago.

A lot has changed in the eight years between those two moments.

Hill first came to Australia at 17 for Australian Fashion Week, still new enough to runway modelling that she describes herself at the time as “Bambi on ice”. She was supposed to stay little more than a week. Instead, she stayed for almost two months.

“I was really sad when I had to leave,” she laughs.

Returning to Australian Fashion Week more than a decade later, last night, Hill opened L’IDÉE WOMAN’s presentation in what felt less like a nostalgic return than a reflection of how significantly Australian fashion itself has evolved in that time. Once viewed largely through the lens of emerging talent, Australian brands now operate with a distinctly global confidence – technically sophisticated, creatively self-assured and increasingly visible beyond the industry’s own borders.

Hill’s casting carried a symbolic weight within that shift. Four years after the brand’s Fashion Week debut, L’IDÉE WOMAN presented a collection grounded in sculptural pleating, liquid movement and high-gloss glamour that felt entirely aligned with fashion’s renewed appetite for occasion dressing, while still maintaining something distinctly Australian in its sensibility: instinctive, sensual and slightly undone.

Hill speaks about fashion with the kind of clarity that only comes from growing up inside an industry while simultaneously learning how to exist outside of it. There’s less interest in mythology now. Less attachment to the performance of modelling as identity. What interests her more is ownership – of time, creativity, energy and selfhood.

“I’ve always wanted to build something that was mine,” she tells me.

It’s a mindset that has gradually shaped the trajectory of Hill’s career beyond modelling. While much of the world still associates her with runway shows, magazine covers and Victoria’s Secret-era visibility, Hill’s attention has increasingly shifted toward entrepreneurship and creative autonomy — particularly through her brand Tate & Taylor, and Stonefruit, the jewellery label she co-founded with her younger sister, Mackinley.

Listening to Hill speak about the brand, it becomes obvious that she approaches business less as commerce and more as emotional world-building. Conversations begin with references, moods and instincts long before they arrive at logistics. Her sister designs; Hill shapes concepts alongside her – the process reflective of a kind of creative shorthand between siblings already fluent in each other’s thinking.

“She’s the designer. Everything starts in her brain,” Hill says. “We’ll build concepts together, talk about emotions, references, what we want something to feel like. Then suddenly it comes to life.”

There’s a similar instinctiveness to the way Hill talks about creativity more broadly. Earlier that afternoon, before the theatre filled with producers, editors and pre-show noise, I watched her move through the Australian Chamber Orchestra space in sequins with almost no direction at all. No over-performance. No attempt to manufacture intimacy for the camera. Just responsiveness. Instinct. An unspoken rhythm that made the entire shoot feel less like production and more like observation.

For someone who has spent more than half her life being photographed, Hill remains surprisingly uninterested in over-explaining herself. Instead, she talks animatedly about fantasy novels, snowboarding, her dog and the TV shows she watches with her husband. There’s something refreshing in the lack of performance around her interests. Nothing feels strategically assembled into personality. Maybe that’s why she still feels so recognisable after all this time.

Fashion has always had a tendency to preserve women inside singular versions of themselves, particularly those who enter the industry young. Certain images calcify culturally; certain eras become difficult to separate from the people inside them. But Hill has managed to resist becoming entirely trapped within one fixed iteration of her own visibility.

Toward the end of our conversation, I ask Hill what makes an image memorable now, in a culture where we consume thousands every day.

“Perspective,” she says first.

“For me, I can tell when we’re taking a good picture. You feel in sync with the photographer and the team around you, and you feel like it’s magic.”

Backstage at Walsh Bay, that feeling had already settled into the room long before either of us named it.

PHOTOGRAPHER Kitty Callaghan

EXECUTIVE FASHION DIRECTOR Hannah Cooper

TALENT Taylor Hill @ IMG

HAIR Joey Scandizzo using ELEVEN Haircare

MAKEUP Jade Kisnorbo using By Terry, Emrbyollise

PHOTOGRAPHER’S ASSISTANT Fleur Keijzer

FASHION ASSISTANT Koby Dulac-Daley