Bella Hadid has a history of wearing provocative costumes to the annual Cannes Film Festival. But there’s one that gives her pause.

Bella spoke about her fears at the start of her modeling career in a new video interview with Vogue, pointing to a specific episode that still makes her shudder to this day. When asked about her most memorable costumes, Bella revealed that the crimson Alexandre Vauthier gown she wore to the Cannes Film Festival in 2016 wasn’t her favorite.

“OK so this is apparently a very iconic red dress moment,” Hadid said. “I was nervous in this dress. I look very sexual and all these things. I was still nervous about cameras and nervous about having a lot of makeup on and nervous about this slit.”

She adds, “I kind of get embarrassed by this moment still, even though this dress is gorgeous. It’s just, again, this doesn’t feel so much like me and I think that this was the start of the Bella persona that everyone sees in me.”

Bella Hadid poses on the red carpet at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. Daniele Venturelli/Getty Images

The model also said that the outfit represents her alter ego, ‘Belinda,’ who is very ‘va-va-voom’ – the polar opposite of her true nature.

“Bless her, love her. She was very nervous,” Bella joked, before admitting that it wasn’t until the 2018 Met Gala that she “really felt sexy and beautiful.” She donned an all-black ensemble by Chrome Hearts for the event’s theme of Heavenly Bodies, which included a latex corset, a lengthy skirt, and a 10-pound hair veil with a sheer train.

She reflected on her red carpet experience, saying, “I felt like myself.”

This is not the first time Hadid has spoken frankly about the need to project a certain image. In an interview for Vogue’s 2021 September cover, she said that she felt she had to adopt a “sexbot” alter ego early in her career.

“It’s like there were two Bellas – me, this person in the process of figuring out who she was, and ‘Bella Hadid’ the alter ego, who was, I dunno, a sexbot who goes out every night?” Hadid said of her experience breaking into the modeling world at the age of 17.

Hadid added: “Now I don’t want to live in that box. I definitely feel like I’m allowed to speak.”

Bella Hadid’s stunning Schiaparelli gown, which she wore to the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, swept the internet by storm. The photographs were first released on Schiaparelli’s official Instagram account, and then on Hadid’s Instagram. Hadid wore a long-sleeved wool crepe dress with a low-cut neckline and a rhinestone-encrusted gilded brass necklace in the style of a human lung’s pulmonary veins. According to People magazine, Bella’s gown is from Schiaparelli’s Haute Couture Fall-Winter 2021/22 collection and was designed by Daniel Roseberry, Schiaparelli’s Artistic Director. Hadid wore the gown at the Tre Piani premiere (Three Floors).