Julia Nobis has been a supermodel for 16 years. But she has never been particularly interested in being famous. Or being online. She’d rather be gardening, watching hawks and talking about microbiology. Here, we get to know her off duty.
On the last day of the Spring 2011 shows in Paris, an 18-year-old Julia Nobis was wrapping up her second runway season where she had walked for the likes of Chanel, Louis Vuitton, and Balenciaga. At the same time, an app quietly dropped in the iOS App Store that would change fashion forever. Later that day, the dust settled in Jardin des Tuileries and fashion editors packed their LV cases. No one knew that this would be the last ever fashion week of the BI (Before Instagram) era.
In the years that followed, Instagram would reshape the fashion ecosystem entirely. It fast tracked the blurring between model and celebrity, while follower counts and engagement emerged as new forms of social and professional currency. Julia, who has largely resisted this pressure to post, might be the last offline supermodel. To this day, she still doesn’t have an Instagram account or an iPhone. While her contemporaries racked up follower counts in the millions, she realised early on that a more analogue life was the true luxury. “I used to get into arguments with agents who told me I needed to get Instagram,” she quips, “but I was always ok to step back. I wasn’t there for the clout. I was there to do the work.”
After all, when she was starting out, Julia had nothing to lose. It wasn’t like she ever imagined a career in fashion in the first place. If it didn’t work out, she would complete her degree in medicine and become an emergency room doctor like she’d always planned.
Growing up in Sydney in the 2000s, Julia was a gangly science kid who was obsessed with Nine Inch Nails, Queens of the Stone Age, and Rage Against The Machine. If someone had told her aged 13 that one day she would star in global campaigns for Prada, Dior, and Celine, she wouldn’t have believed them. Her slightly austere, unconventional beauty didn’t fit with “the typical beach babe” standard she was surrounded with at the time. “I was horribly ashamed of my body,” she says, before softening this statement. “Well, nothing more than your average teenager who’s a bit awkward and doesn’t particularly love what’s going on with their body.”
The first time someone told her she should be a model, she shrugged it off. “I was just a run-of-the-mill person,” she says. “A bit awkward here, not terrible there.” A few weeks later, she was tapped on the shoulder while waiting at Bondi Junction bus stop in her school uniform. “I thought she was asking for directions,” Julia recalls. “She asked if I was a model and wrote down her info on the back of my maths homework. It was the second time something like that had happened so I decided to do something about it.”
Over the next two years, she did a couple of test shoots, walked in her cousin’s school fashion show and did two shows at Sydney Fashion Week, where she met her future New York agent, but modelling wasn’t her priority. She was determined to finish school first. “I landed in New York on 19th January 2010,” she remembers. In true Australian fashion, what she remembers most from those days is the cold. “It was the coldest I’ve ever been. I got off the plane and it was something like minus 13. That was quite a shock coming from an Australian summer.”
That was almost two decades ago. Today, Julia, now 34, is at home in Connecticut. Her home is her sanctuary away from the frenetic pace of New York City and all that comes with it. Over Zoom, her coolly striking features are framed by her signature wispy blonde hair. She’s relaxed, yet effusive, wrapped up in a cosy, oversized hoodie from the Roy Roger’s x Dave’s collab. This is her week of rest in the countryside before shooting off to Milan and Paris for the 30-something time. Temporarily removed from the demands of being one of fashion’s most-booked models, she is taking the time to water her own garden, literally. “I’m doing a whole lot of gardening,” she says excitedly. “I built a pond last summer. There are two fish and a couple of frogs so I’ve got to maintain their environment.” She also spends her time here wood carving, drawing and jamming on her various instruments, including a drum practice pad she bought recently.
It’s a slow paced, analogue lifestyle that acts as an antidote to the Spring/Summer 2027 New York season she has just finished. Last week, she closed Khaite’s 10th anniversary show, walked through the sculpture garden at the MoMA for Michael Kors and returned to the Calvin Klein runway once again, marking more than 16 years of their continuous collaboration.
That was where it all began for Julia. Shortly after arriving in New York, aged 17, she followed in the footsteps of Christy Turlington and Karlie Kloss by signing an exclusive contract with Calvin Klein. She made her runway debut shortly afterwards, wearing a sculptural white coat and cream ankle boots, her slicked-back hair highlighting her sharp features and arresting beauty.
It was only when she stepped out after that first show that she realised how much her life was about to change.
Julia wears dress & tights VETEMENTS; boots LOEWE; earring MARC JACOBS
“There were a bajillion street style photographers when I got outside,” she recalls. “I was like, holy fuck, what is this?” She got straight into a car taking her from the show to the airport where she would fly to Europe and continue the rest of fashion month, walking for Prada, Louis Vuitton, Miu Miu, Valentino, and Margiela. By March 2010, she was named by Models.com as one of the Top 10 Newcomers in the world.
In the seasons that followed, she fronted multiple prestigious global campaigns for the likes of Prada, Celine, Christian Dior, Saint Laurent, Balenciaga, and Givenchy. In the early 2010s, she regularly walked a staggering 60 to 70 shows per season. Back then, fashion weeks felt even more chaotic than they do now. “There used to be all of the backstage photographers,” she says. “It was so hectic. Back in the day, on the runway, they would still straight up yell at you if you weren’t perfectly in line because if you went out of focus for a second by being too close or too far from the camera they wouldn’t get the shot.”
To add to this already frenzied environment – or, perhaps, to find some respite from it – Julia would read her Applied Science course textbooks on an iPad backstage, fitting in whatever slivers of time she could to revise for her university exams. In Autumn/Winter 2012, she walked in 73 shows, but she was still the science kid from Sydney who wanted to learn everything she could about medicine and microbiology. So, she started a Bachelor of Science (Applied Science) course at Melbourne’s RMIT with a view to pursuing her childhood dream of becoming an emergency room doctor.
There is a hint of regret in her voice now when she talks about her dreams of working in medicine – perhaps not a regret for the extraordinary life she has lived, but a sadness at the impossibility of living more than one life at once. “I’m not a young kid anymore,” she sighs. “You have to go through an additional eight to 10 years of schooling so I would be 45 by the time I got out on the other end. It feels like maybe the window is no longer there.”
While Julia’s life has, indeed, been extraordinary, she had always imagined something more ordinary for herself. As a child, she thought her thirties would be quiet and domestic. She would have a job in medicine and at least one child by the age of 26. Instead, she has spent more than half of her life being one of the most in-demand models in the world.
She tried to pursue that other life, completing her Applied Science course in 2019 then doing EMT ambulance training and taking a fashion sabbatical to volunteer in Peru. However, once her fashion bookings ramped up again post-lockdown, fitting medical work around her hectic modelling schedule proved challenging. “I got my EMT licence which means I can work on an ambulance,” she says, “but I was never really able to work because my schedule is so inconsistent.”
Still, she doubts that a career in medicine would have fundamentally changed who she is. “Every time I bump into someone I haven’t seen for 10 years, they’re like, ‘Fuck me, you haven’t changed at all!’” she says. There’s something reassuring in that. Whether she had spent her twenties in an ambulance or on runways around the world, perhaps Julia would have remained, in essence, exactly the same.
“People think that models are going to be very self-centred and only care about themselves,” she says, but that’s often far from the case. Modelling isn’t always an easy job, either. Over the years, Julia has endured some particularly punishing shoots: a barcode-shaped sunburn across her face after a shoot in the desert; eight hours of jumping on a trampoline that left her unable to walk for two days; and the time she walked along a cliff face in high heels. She’s been memed. False stories have been written about her. “That was the moment I felt like I made it,” she says, “When an article with completely false information was written about me.”
Another one of her ‘I’ve made it’ moments came when she bumped into Victoria Beckham in a department store food hall. “Just realising that I can go up to this incredibly famous person and be like, ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ and have a big hug in the middle of a fucking department store then go on our merry way,” she jokes, “I was like, oh, this is not a normal experience. I’ve made it, to some degree.”
However, making it as a model can come with a level of scrutiny and fan entitlement that people in less public facing professions are rarely subject to. In 2021, Julia was forced to finally create an Instagram account after someone pretended to be her on the app. “At first, it was cute and flattering and I didn’t mind,” she says, “but then it got weird and they started commenting on clients’ and colleagues’ pictures and occasionally DM’ing them as if they were me.” The final straw was when they stalked her dad on Facebook to pull pictures of her when she was a child to try to make the page look legitimate. Julia reluctantly downloaded Instagram just so she could report them and get the account taken down. Today, her official account still exists, but she rarely uses it. The only photo on her page is from October 2025; a ‘No Bikes’ sign on the pavement covered by her black Vans Plimsoll so it reads ‘Nobis.’
For all the surreal moments of her career, Julia seems happiest when she’s doing things that have nothing to do with fashion at all. She birdwatches. She listens to podcasts about microbiology. She plays Pokemon Go while walking her dog. When she’s staying at her rented apartment in New York’s East Village, she goes to Tompkins Square Park to keep track of the local hawks. “Christo and Amelia were together for 11 years, but now it seems that Christo has passed away,” she recounts, narrating the story with all the panache of a gripping soap opera or some juicy fashion gossip about the latest creative director musical chairs. “There’s a new bird on campus called Charlie, so now Charlie and Amelia are together and they’ve had two clutches. I was absolutely shocked that Amelia moved on so quickly!”
It is this playful, down-to-earth quality that complements Julia’s distinctive appearance and unrelenting work ethic. She has remained a fashion insider for almost two decades without seeming particularly interested in playing the role of one. It gave her a bargaining chip when agents challenged her about her lack of social media presence.
Staying offline has helped her preserve her separation between work and relaxation. Yet she is realistic about the privilege this represents. There have been times when brands have told her they couldn’t justify booking someone without a quantifiable online following. She is established enough that this no longer bothers her, but for a young model starting out, she knows it might be a different story. “I don’t think it’s necessarily a very viable strategy today,” she muses. “At my first Calvin Klein show, Instagram wasn’t even a thing yet. By the time it really blew up, I had enough of a career behind me that I had legs to stand on in that regard.”
Throughout her career, Julia has remained a model’s model; the kind of model fashion people obsess over. She belongs to an era when clothes themselves started conversations, rather than the viral campaigns surrounding them; when models, not celebrities, filled magazine covers; when being good at your job was enough, without having to create content on the side to build your brand or prove your worth. But Julia isn’t interested in being a symbol for any of it. She just happens to have lived an extraordinary life while, by all appearances, remaining remarkably herself.
Photography Drew Vickers
Styling Alastair McKimm
Words Sophie Lou Wilson
Hair James Pecis at Bryant Artists
Make-up Yadim Carranza at Art Partner
Manicurist Dawn Sterling at Bryant Artists
Set Design Stefan Beckman
Production Company LOLA Production
Casting Rachel Chandler for MIDLAND
Lighting Technician Nate Margolis
1st Photo Assistant Ashton Herman
2nd Photo Assistant Amelia Hammond
Digital Tech Mike Skigen
Fashion Assistants Taylor Wood, Jody Bain
Hair Assistants Beth Shanefelter, Kyia Jones
Make-up Assistant Aimi Osada
Set Assistants Levi Gittleman, Eli Tamarkin
Post-Production Artpost
