Elsa Hosk and her family bare it all for Vogue Scandinavia

Elsa Hosk and I are having technical difficulties. “Unable to access camera?” She says, quizzically. On my screen, a big black box stating “Elsa” where her face ought to be. “I had to do this on my phone,” she says. “Hold on.” As she attempts to tech support the issue, I panic-Google “Zoom iPhone camera not working.” Imagine interviewing Elsa Hosk and not getting to look at her. And then, the unmissable face of Sweden’s biggest supermodel appears.

“Your hair looks amazing,” I say, dumbly. But really, it does – the embodiment of the phrase “beach waves.” “Oh, it’s wild,” she says. “I cut bangs and when you have curly hair, the bangs just become this eighties fluff.” She pats her curly fringe. “I’m trying to live with it.” She wears a relaxed, oatmeal-hued Khaite knit cardigan, her skin a colour that indicates she sees the sun regularly. I suddenly feel extremely pale, sitting in her home country of Sweden.

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Hosk is in the guest house of her Richard Neutra-designed mid-century Los Angeles home, which has been under renovation for some months now. “We’re actually bringing the house back to the way it was intended,” she says, noting that there are very specific requirements on what materials can be used and what changes can be made when restoring a historic home. Having previously lived in an expansive New York loft, Hosk and her partner, Tom Daly, moved cross-country shortly before the arrival of their daughter, Tuulikki Joan Daly.

Born to a Swedish father and Finnish mother, Hosk grew up in Bromma, a charming Stockholm borough, surrounded by “very, very beautiful houses.” “It’s kind of a wealthy area,” she says. “We were not wealthy – we had this little house that my dad renovated himself.” How extraordinary that a girl from Bromma would go on to become one of the industry’s most famous faces. “It is weird,” she says. “No one ever expected that.”

Though she currently has 7.2 million followers on Instagram, when Hosk, now 33, first dipped her toe into modelling, the platform was inconceivable. “Today it’s different, because girls grow up and they have Instagram, they have the internet and they know about celebrities and models,” she says. “When I was a teenager, we were literally going down to the town square and playing with a ball.” Her only connection to celebrity culture was via MTV, where she tuned in to devour episodes of The Simple Life.

So, when a family friend suggested to Hosk’s father that he get the kids into modelling (Hosk has two brothers), Hosk had little insight into the world she was entering. She had just turned 13 when she first went to meet with Mikas, the Swedish agency that remains her mother agency to this day. “I even remember what I was wearing. I was wearing this green Diesel sweater – I was a total tomboy,” she says. “I had braces. I didn’t see myself as beautiful at all.” Her first modelling gig was for a company that provides food to local schools. The campaign appeared on the Swedish metro. “I was holding a plate with cooked sausage and vegetables,” she says.

When things started picking up, Hosk’s dad got a motorcycle to zip his daughter to castings on her lunch break. Soon she was shooting for Guess, then later Versace, Balmain, Dior – the list goes on.

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Few models have managed to cross over into mainstream celebrity in the manner that Hosk has. For that, she largely credits one job in particular: Victoria’s Secret. The model got her wings in 2015, well before the brand was taken to task for promoting one very specific sort of beauty. “I came into VS at such a perfect time,” she says, noting that back then, the company put a lot of effort and money into building the personal brands of their Angels. “We would get up in the morning and be on Good Morning America to show the latest bra,” she says. “It was so crazy.” She received media training for her constant appearances, which ranged from showing up at in-store events to stopping by Jimmy Fallon with the other Angels – her “colleagues,” as she calls them – to promote the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.

Hosk got on Instagram early. Once her contract with VS ran out, she really “became herself” on the platform – expressing her innate sense of style as well as sharing personal struggles and how she’s overcome them. The model has been especially candid about her experience with drug and alcohol abuse, which eventually led her to sobriety at the age of 20.

In her early teens, Hosk had plenty of obligations to “keep her accountable.” There was modelling, school and, perhaps most importantly, basketball, which she pursued at a professional level. But when she quit the latter and moved to New York to focus on modelling full time, there was less to keep her occupied. “I had to fill that with something, so I was getting into alcohol and drugs because I just felt empty. Like, ‘Who am I?’ I was lost,” she says. “But I think it would have happened any way, because I believe that when you’re an addict, an alcoholic, it’s in you.” She’s happy that “it happened” when she was so young. Sobriety taught Hosk about “showing up and being accountable” – she doubts she would have had such a thriving career had she not gotten sober.

When I ask if it was challenging to suddenly be sober in the city that never sleeps, Hosk tells me it was quite the opposite. “I was so lucky to be in New York,” she says. “In Sweden at the time, it wasn’t very common that people were sober.” In the years that followed, ever y time she would return home there was a “pressure to drink.” Having lived in both cities myself, I can see her point. There’s a distinctly casual nature to drinking in Sweden, and alcohol plays a starring role in just about every celebration. In New York, Hosk had access to AA meetings “all over, at all times.” “There were such cool people going there – people to look up to, celebrities, models,” says Hosk. “It was such a vibe to be sober.”

We shift topics to the more recent seismic change in Hosk’s life, the arrival of her daughter, Tuulikki. “It’s my mom’s middle name,” she says. “The Finnish names are so cute.” She begins running through the names of her family members – her grandma Pirkko, her aunt Pirjo. Tuulikki, whom they call Tuuli for short, also shares a name with a Finnish forest goddess. “When I was pregnant, I was craving green and nature,” says Hosk. “Then Tuuli came out and she is obsessed with green.” Leaves are Tuuli’s favourite – Hosk says she can be mesmerised by them for hours.

Tuuli already shares a “strong connection” with the grandma for whom she is named. “She’s really scared of loud people, and my mom is so quiet – like a forest. She lives in her own little bubble and she’s so calm,” says Hosk. “[Tuuli] has a lot of that. She has this really thoughtful quality to her that my mum has.” For her very first Vogue cover shoot, Tuuli was characteristically easygoing – calmly exploring and playing. A natural, just like mom. Meanwhile, when Hosk called up Daly to ask him if he’d appear on the cover, naked, he had just one concern. “He was like, ‘But it’s in 10 days. I don’t have time to get ripped’.”

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I rang up photographer Torbjørn Rødland, who shot our cover at a house in Los Feliz, to ask what Hosk was like as a subject. One word comes up again and again: professional. “She’s attentive and serious about the task at hand,” he says, also noting that she was the first person on set, ahead of himself and his crew. “None of this, ‘hanging out and seeing what happens’ attitude.” The Norwegian artist, whose work has been exhibited from the Fondazione Prada to the Whitney Museum of American Art, embraced the “unpredictability” of baby Tuuli, who just wanted to “crawl away and explore the garden.” When Daly got off task, joking around or losing his concentration, Hosk got him back on track. “It was an interesting sort of banter,” says Rødland.

Hosk met Daly, a Brit then living in New York, serendipitously, at his going away dinner at Indochine. Coincidentally, he was off to Stockholm to work for Acne Studios. “I was just invited randomly to this party and I was seated next to him,” Hosk says. “I was kind of in a relationship at the time and he was also in a relationship at the time, but I do remember it was love at first sight.” Daly recalls things a little bit differently. “She tells this amazing story that she always knew we were going to be together,” he says, when I reach him by phone a couple days later. “But I don’t know if we can quite believe her on that.” According to Daly, he was, in fact, single at the time and even asked Hosk to in troduce him to her female friends and “she did not.”

A few years later, Daly moved back to New York to start a business of his own – a running eyewear and apparel brand called District Vision. As fate would have it, he set up shop right on Hosk’s street. Eventually, she asked him out. “He was so different from the guys I’d been dating. He was not possessive. He wasn’t a rich guy who wanted arm candy. He was just a normal, cool guy – super happy, very funny,” she says. “I was so nervous to make the first move,” says Daly. “It took me six weeks. I would walk her to her front door and just drop her off and carry on walking.” Apparently it worked. “I was kind of obsessed with him,” says Hosk.

For Daly, appearing au natural on the cover of Vogue is a little out of the ordinary, though he has been “forced into” modelling next to his supermodel girlfriend in the past. I ask him what the experience is like and he says, “Well, you don’t want to stand next to Picasso and paint a picture while he’s painting.” For Hosk, however, it’s just another day at the office. Nudity has never been a big deal for the model. As is often the case in Sweden, she grew up in a family that “loved being naked.” “It’s not a sexual thing, it’s just a natural thing,” she says. “When you come to America, being naked is all about sex.” Her upbringing afforded her a comfort in her body that made it easier to, say, walk down the Victoria Secret runway in a $1 million fantasy bra, but she never really saw herself as a “sexy lingerie model.”

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To say people are obsessed with what Hosk wears is an understatement – every outfit is worthy of tabloid coverage and I am willing to bet a large chunk of her followers are there for the clothes (though she jokes that, “A big part of my following is probably not interested in that”). Recently, she’s taken her love of fashion one step further, stepping behind the scenes to collaborate with the likes of J Brand and Christopher Cloos. Up next, a brand of her very own: Helsa. “It’s very simple and sustainable,” she says. Everyday pieces you’ll wear again and again, based on “Scandinavian values.”

With Tuuliki having just celebrated her first birthday, Hosk is still finding her work-life balance. “It’s like every parent says, but every day they discover something new,” she says. “I was in Milan yesterday and Tom sent me a video where she was calling for me, saying ‘Mama,’ and looking around.” Hosk widens her eyes, peering around the room. She’s making an effort to take on projects that can be executed from home – a new reality facilitated by the pandemic. Soon the renovation will be done and she and her family will be comfortably in their fantasy home. A little slice of paradise, a California dream.