As our founder celebrates two milestones — one personal, one professional — she tells BAZAAR how she leveraged that profile to build her own powerhouse personal brand.

ELLE MACPHERSON, Australian icon, a household name for the past four decades and latter-day wellness evangelist, drinks structured water. To be precise, double-filtered structured water. Three litres a day, no less, sipped at 15-minute intervals. These are among the revelations in an hour-plus-long chat with Australia’s greatest-ever model.

What even is structured water? A hotly debated wellness craze du jour, the claimed merits of which are premised on the theory that the molecules of ‘living’ water found in flowing rivers and streams differ to those of standard tap water and boast enhanced health benefits (which can be artificially contrived, claim marketers, via their plethora of ‘vortexing’ devices).

“I didn’t know about it before,” offers Macpherson down the line from Byron Bay during a short break back home for Christmas — her infamous international drawl (dubbed by Vanity Fair as “Riviera-tinged” in its 2005 story “And God Created Elle” — a legacy of living abroad for all her adult life), twanged by a surprising degree of Strine. “I’ve been back for a month,” she notes. “Sometimes when I’m in the States, I might modify it because I want to be understood. But I’m so proud to be Australian and I don’t want to lose my accent. I don’t want to homogenise it.”

This article originally appeared in the April 2024 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR Australia/New Zealand. Read the rest of it here.

Words by PATTY HUNTINGTON.
Photographed by JAMES TOLICH.
Styled by JILLIAN DAVISON.