The Male Model Who Lost His Hair

Justin Hopwood's perfect looks helped him land a perfect career, traveling the world to model for Ralph Lauren. Then he was diagnosed with alopecia. What do you do when you lose your money-maker? Especially when that money-maker is a perfect head of hair? He's trying to figure that out.
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The story of Justin Hopwood is necessarily the story of Justin Hopwood’s hair. It opens with a bowl cut in Hopwood’s early years. Then his hair is irrelevant for a few prepubescent chapters. He begins traveling the globe as a model. His hair assumes more importance—and more volume—with each passing year. He becomes the face of Abercrombie & Fitch, and then the face of Ralph Lauren. Then it all comes screeching to a halt in 2015, when Hopwood, male model and noted hair-haver, realizes his hair has begun to fall out.

“You have to fit all the right categories,” the 28-year-old Hopwood says of modeling. “It’s a genetic lottery that you play.” For a while there Hopwood checked every box—he had the height, the bod, the face, and the hair—but then suddenly he didn’t. It’s been two years since Hopwood began seeing symptoms of alopecia areata, and almost as long since he’s worked.

Hopwood and I meet for lunch in Greenwich Village on one of the last warm days of the summer. He’s wearing a white Henley, white pants, and a newsboy cap. The windows of the restaurant are wide open, and Hopwood literally breezes into the room. Even if I didn’t already know who he was, I’d know he’s a model. He’s the high school crush incarnate, sun-kissed and symmetrical. His handsomeness is overwhelming.

We take our seats. Across the street is a particularly photogenic brick wall, where a model with waist-length hair poses before a large crew. Hopwood squints to see if he knows this particular genetic lottery winner. He always looks at big shoots like this to see if he knows anyone in the crew. The model looks like Miranda, Hopwood says—as in Miranda Kerr—but he can’t tell if it’s her. There have been times over the last few years when Hopwood has thought his alopecia would exclude him from the spectacle across the street forever, but now he's not so sure: Can a male model with hair loss make it in an industry that markets male perfection?


All clothing, Berluti

As a kid in South Africa, Hopwood had thick blond hair cut into a voluminous mushroom, like the boys in board-game commercials in the ’90s. Every December, over his summer break, Hopwood would ask his mother if he could dye his hair blond like Eminem. Every year she said no, but the sun bleached it blond anyway.

Hopwood modeled for a small boutique modeling agency called Kids Inc. Cape Town is a B-list market for models, catering to American and European clients looking for light-eyed, blond kids. “Their winter was our summer, and they would always come to South Africa, looking for kids that replicated the German look,” he recalls. “It kind of worked out in my favor.” He still remembers the ideal height for a child model in South Africa: 148 cm. Hopwood leapt every hurdle: Complexion! Sample size! And God, that thick blond hair!

Then puberty hit. Models often say they looked awkward when they were young, but usually they mean it the way Megan Fox means it when she calls herself a nerd. Hopwood means it: He had terrible acne and dressed like a skater. He didn’t think much about girls, and he definitely didn’t think much about modeling. Instead, he got into sports. He shaved that beautiful blond hair twice, for rugby and cricket initiations.

By 20, the acne was long gone and the hair was back with a luscious vengeance. Hopwood had abs you could climb like a ladder, and a girlfriend. He went to Hong Kong for two months for his first big modeling trip. Hong Kong was a limbo where a young South African model could see if he'd be able to cut it in more exclusive markets like New York and Paris. Every day, Hopwood says, he shot for eight hours, with a break in the afternoon when he was given a small sandwich. “My earnings after two months of slaving away there was half what I’ve earned in one day in New York. I had fun, but I was away from my family and my first girlfriend at the time—we had just started dating. I was like, ‘I’m done with modeling—thanks guys, that was great.’” He returned to South Africa, determined to chill.

And chill Hopwood did, until his former agent reached out. His agent told him a big American photographer whom Hopwood had never heard of was interested in shooting him for a big brand that Hopwood had also never heard of, but that he probably wasn’t going to get the contract. Hopwood didn’t think much of the call: His parents were going through a divorce, so he was staying with his girlfriend. Then they broke up, and Hopwood, at odds, went to stay with a friend. That was when he got a second call—he’d gotten the job. The big photographer was Bruce Weber, who would shoot Hopwood for the next issue of A&F Quarterly, a now-deceased periodical published by the big brand: Abercrombie & Fitch. A&F Quarterly featured beautiful photographs of young people, most white and many nude. Hopwood had been tapped for the quarterly’s revival (in 2003 Abercrombie had terminated the publication after a Christmas issue that promised “280 pages of moose, ice hockey, chivalry, group sex, & more…”). Just days after he got the call, Hopwood flew to Miami. He was broke, feeding on packs of seitan and cheap pizza until the checks started to roll in. “I was like, ‘Fuck yeah, I’m going to Miami!’” Hopwood recalls. “I’m 21 and I’m just happy to be there. Happy to be in the spotlight.”

Photographed by Arnaldo Anaya, Courtesy of Ralph Lauren
Photographed by Arnaldo Anaya, Courtesy of Ralph Lauren

When a photo of Hopwood was selected for the cover of A&F Quarterly, he stumbled into the kind of big break models dream of. From the cover, 21-year-old Hopwood pouts at young people the world over, stooping slightly like he’s a little too tall for the frame—at 6’2”, he remains an ideal height for his chosen field. He was immediately signed by his current agent, Jason Kanner, the Don Corleone of America’s hunkiest male models, and flown to New York. “Your eyes are very close together,” Hopwood remembers Kanner telling him by way of greeting. “You kind of look like a Cyclops. But you’re beautiful, sit down." (Kanner does not recall the specifics of this meeting, but conceded that he's been "a bit of a smart-ass at times.”) Kanner sent Hopwood uptown with a Post-It directing him to Ralph Lauren’s offices. Soon after, Hopwood was confirmed for his first Ralph Lauren campaign. He worked with Ralph Lauren from 2010 until 2016, modeling for many arms of the brand. Here he is wearing shorts with a nautical print and a cable-knit sweater, walking a dog. There he is on an anonymous college campus, grinning while another model signs one of the 900 layers he’s wearing. He’s the prince of prep.

“To have a career like that with a brand is unheard of,” Hopwood says. “They were extremely good to me. Five years.” Being a Ralph Lauren man—the Ralph Lauren man—busted open the industry for Hopwood. He did “money jobs” for other brands that wanted to harness his Ralph Lauren–ness, and traveled constantly. “A lot of small companies just wanted to have that preppy guy, and I was the most preppy-looking guy in the world.”


Leather flight jacket, $8,950, and T-shirt, Berluti

In 2015, Hopwood, in Miami between shoots, was FaceTiming with his father. He had a patch on his beard, and his father asked him about it. Hopwood had noticed it before, a spot right under his chin where the hairs went from dark to light to bare, but he didn’t want to talk about it. He and his dad were close, but it was a closeness built around playing and watching sports rather than airing anxieties. Still, his father correctly identified the spot as a symptom of alopecia, which may be caused in part by stress. “At the time, I’m struggling from this worry, this daily feeling that is overcoming me, and I don’t know where it’s coming from,” Hopwood recalls. “This area starts getting worse and worse, and I’m shaving it, hiding it. It’s not affecting anything, it hasn’t gone to my head or anything like that, and a lot of times I’m like, ‘Thank God it hasn’t gone to my head. Let it hit my beard. I’m a clean-shaven look anyway.’”

Hopwood clung to thoughts like that. Groomers can deal with a spotty beard, but what brand promoting manly vigor and perfection will sign a balding guy? “Losing your hair is losing your income,” Hopwood explains. “You can be in an office job and they want you to use your brain, and you’re fine. Financially you’re fine. You’re still going to get your paycheck. Your boss isn’t going to be like, Oh, you have alopecia—you’re out. And not to say that that’s the case with modeling, but it’s like, I get it. You have to follow a certain image, and that’s the way it is.”

Alopecia is an autoimmune skin disease that causes the body to attack its hair follicles, stunning them. Alopecia areata affects almost 7 million Americans, but I knew very little about it before meeting Hopwood. There’s no universal agreement about the causes of alopecia, but Hopwood is sure that his anxiety was a factor, and so a discussion of Hopwood’s recovery from alopecia is as much about mental health as it is about follicle health. The built-in stressors of modeling—I imagine frequent travel, unpredictable hours, and pressure to balance the creative demands of a rotation of colleagues—were compounded by Hopwood’s stress over his alopecia, and then by stress over his stress. It took him a long time to wrangle his anxieties. Xanax was presented as a solution, but Hopwood was committed to a mind-over-matter approach. “You have to get this strong mind,” he tells me with so much conviction that it sounds easy. “If this is caused by my own thinking, then surely I can stop this feeling, I can stop myself from feeling this pressure. I think it was that realization: that I’m in control of this. Over the course of a week, I woke up and thought, 'Ah, this is gone.' I felt normal again.”

Eventually Hopwood's alopecia did move to his head. Hopwood has the least aggressive form of the disease, but it spread from his beard with no particular pattern. When we meet, Hopwood has grown out his beard a bit so I’ll get the full effect. I don’t immediately notice the patchiness, though a man might. He points to where the alopecia had traveled: “It spread here and went there. And there. And there. Found its way over here.” He takes off his hat for only a few seconds to show me his scalp. “I kind of miss having a hairstyle. It’s almost there, but it’s not. I’m not totally bald, but it’s tufts of hair.” His dark, thick hairs stand out against the weak blond ones that have begun to come in in spots that Hopwood calls “islands.” That’s exactly it: His head looks like Earth.

“It’s not pleasing for the eye,” Hopwood says. When he talks about his alopecia, it’s without the vocabulary of the body-positivity movement, which has helped female models, at least, market their differences. Plus-size model Ashley Graham and model Winnie Harlow, who has the skin condition vitiligo, are celebrated for their so-called flaws, not in spite of them. When Hopwood discusses his prospects in the industry, it’s in much starker terms: “For someone selling beauty, it’s like, ‘We understand he’s a handsome guy, but half his head is missing of hair.’ It’s not going to add up.” Hopwood built a career and a brand as the All-American man—never mind that he’s South African—and the All-American man has thick, beautiful hair.

Still, he hasn’t given up on the industry. “I think everyone has really, over the last couple years, really grown into this idea of accepting people for who they are, what they are. There’s a unity in the world right now that I think is very prolific, that wasn’t there a couple years ago.” Presumably he’s referring to the fashion world and not the world at large, but point taken: If ever there’s been a time to make it as a partially bald male model, this is probably it.

Hopwood doesn’t have illusions about the brands he’s likely to model for. Ralph Lauren, he suspects, is no longer one of them. The company treated him incredibly well for years, Hopwood says, and everyone there is a “class act.” He’s just not on-brand anymore. “Do I expect them to all of the sudden throw me in one of their centerfolds looking the way I do? Hey, I wouldn’t say no, I would embrace it, but would I ask them to change the look that they’ve been known for for 40 or 50 years? No.”


Cashmere topcoat, $5,350, T-shirt, and trousers, $750, all by Berluti

Recently Hopwood decided to shave his head. He wasn’t shooting for commercial clients anymore, and he was sick of running his hands through his hair only to pull out long strands. The head-shaving was like a rite. Hopwood trained hard beforehand. He told Kanner what he was about to do, and Kanner gave his blessing. His friend Bryce Thompson, a photographer, did the shaving, and they did two shoots. One was a classic, steamy setup with Hopwood’s girlfriend, model Daphne Groeneveld. The other was a Fight Club–inspired shoot for which Hopwood dyed his scalp bright red. He Instagrammed a photo from the second shoot in June—the only recent photo he’s posted where his head is visible. The patches of hair are noticeable only if you’re looking for them; Hopwood’s followers seem more preoccupied by his abs.

Hopwood likes his shaved head—it doesn’t feel like a surrender. “I feel like I look younger with my hair shorter… Maybe I feel a little tougher.” I don’t know why a tall, ripped dude wouldn’t already feel maximum tough, but Hopwood is right: He looks edgier. Whatever Hopwood’s future in modeling holds, it will likely be free of tweed.

When someone who’s known for his thick Polo hair cuts it all off, it’s an event. For months, by way of greeting, acquaintances have been walking up to Hopwood and grabbing his hat to check out his shaved head. It’s a high school impulse made more tempting because of Hopwood’s homecoming-king friendliness. It’s always awkward. “They realize that it’s shaved for a reason, because once you take it off, it’s really noticeable,” he says. “They’re not expecting it. Automatically they go into an ‘I’m sorry’ situation. Which is fine. It’s not their fault. Just, don’t lift my hat off my head, butthole.” Most people are immediately apologetic, and Hopwood takes the awkward moments in stride, but it wears on a person.

The support he’s gotten from other models has been encouraging. One model, with whom Hopwood had a polite beef in the past, reached out via Instagram. “He sent me this long message about how proud he is of me, and I hadn’t really even done anything. I was just kind of going about my business,” he says. “He was just very, very, very supportive. It’s been very awesome.”

Another font of hope for Hopwood: His hair is likely to return. Hopwood thinks there’s a good chance that it will grow back as thick as it once was. And he’s taking active measures to make it happen. In the past two years, he says, he's gotten more than 600 hormone injections in his face and head. Hopwood’s caution toward Xanax extends to almost all medication (he prefers to eat tablespoons of garlic when he feels ill), so even though he speaks highly of his dermatologist, the injection process disturbed him. He isn’t interested in the drugs traditionally prescribed for alopecia: The possibility that the hair might fall out again anyway is too depressing. He’s hoping to get into a clinical trial of a new drug that may help, he’s learned to manage his anxiety independent of medication, and he’s replaced his once-involved grooming routine with a hair-growth program called Nutrafol. Hairs have started to grow in, fine and blond. He hopes dark hairs will follow.

In the meantime, Hopwood is working on keeping his industry network alive and getting his real estate license. His father had his own business when Hopwood was growing up, and he’s interested in property, but real estate is less an immediate Plan B than a “one day down the line” option. In general Hopwood is optimistic about his future in modeling, but accepting the possibility of the worst-case scenario—that he might not model again—was a big part of silencing his anxieties. “I think in the beginning it was very tough for me to face the inevitable reality that this is what it is, and if this doesn’t fix itself I’m going to be in a position where I ultimately have to shave my head or work’s going to stop for me. And you have to understand that for someone in my situation, that’s a very daunting thing,” he says. “Once you accept it, you can learn from it, grow from it. Now I’ve got alopecia, but it’s no big deal. [The hair] might come back. But if it doesn’t, whatever, no one’s gonna hate me for it, no one’s gonna dislike me for it.”

He’s also focusing on creating awareness about alopecia. He’s sensitive to the fact that his losses are fairly superficial compared to, say, a cancer patient’s, but he has a new respect for the capacity of alopecia to ruin a life. He tells me his efforts to raise awareness are “for the little girl who’s getting picked on in school because she’s having to wear a wig.” He refers to the little girl so often that I ask if she is real, and he clarifies that she is. She’s the niece of a friend, a 6-year-old in South Africa who has to go to school every day with the same kind of people who whip off Hopwood’s hats—only they’re younger and meaner. He wants that little girl (the actual little girl and all the hypothetical little girls) to look at him and think, “You don’t have to hide your head. He’s known for his hair, he’s in the public eye, but it’s only hair.” Justin Hopwood, the male model with the meteoric career, wants people to know that there is life after perfect looks. “There’s so much more to any person than their aesthetics,” the former face of Ralph Lauren says. “Than their facial features.”


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