why the supermodel is calling Sydney home

On the ground floor of Sydney’s bustling Broadway shopping centre sits the Slay Your Way Cafe, a pop-up slinging scoops of Smize & Dream, the ice-cream venture from supermodel and TV star Tyra Banks. As is my journalistic duty, I order the weirdest thing on the menu, a G’Day G’Night, a salted honey caramel ice-cream with house-made Vegemite brittle and smoked sea salt. It’s … interesting?

Banks, 51, is at least partly responsible for the concoction. “The mandate is do what I say and then do whatever the hell you want,” she says of her leadership approach to her team of 10. “Go crazy, be inspired. If I say ‘pineapple’ and you’re feeling ‘mango’, do mine with pineapple and then do yours with mango. We’re very free here.”

Banks, the ’90s supermodel turned TV mogul turned entrepreneur – famous for her trademark “smize” (meaning “smile with your eyes”) – has been in Sydney for about 18 months with her partner, Canadian businessman Louis Bélanger-Martin, and her nine-year-old son, York, from a previous relationship. The reason? The opening of a Smize & Dream venue in Darling Harbour, tentatively set for May 11 – Mother’s Day.

For much of that time, she’s flown under the radar. But there have been hints of the supermodel in our midst. Online, there’s a picture of her at some event with, weirdly, former foreign minister Julie Bishop. Paparazzi have snapped her on the street sampling gelato (not her own brand) and McDonald’s cheeseburgers. In January, she attended the Australian Open in Melbourne, decked in a black hoodie but hardly in disguise.

In Sydney, she’s even been travelling like a local. “I have my Opal [public transport] card!” she says excitedly. “Riding the ferry makes me happy … we’ll go to Manly, Circular Quay, Balmain” – she says it like the French fashion line – “and it feels so luxurious.”

To my disappointment, given her proximity, our interview takes place online. Banks, it turns out, likes to do meetings in her robe – “a dressing gown, as you guys call it” – meaning her camera is off. Nor will she be drawn on which suburb she has been calling home. “No, we don’t talk about that,” she drawls with a diva affectation.

Eschewing glamour, Banks has remained incognito in Sydney, despite the odd local eyeing her suspiciously. “I transform so much with make-up, [I’m] very chameleon-like,” she says. “But sometimes it doesn’t work, sometimes people are like, ‘Girl, I know it’s you.’”

When she’s not sailing Sydney Harbour, Banks is busy overseeing the store’s construction and researching the gelato competition (she’s partial to Mapo, which has outlets in Newtown and Bondi Beach). By night, she tends to her empire, reportedly worth $US90 million ($143 million), which includes a production company.

“I wake up at all hours because I’m a woman of a certain age,” laughs Banks. “I’m up maybe 10 times a night with a hot flash, and I’m like, ‘Why waste this … sitting here all miserable?’ So I open my iPad or my phone and, since America’s awake, I work. They think I’m a superwoman, and I’m like, no, I’m a sweating woman.”

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Like most successful entrepreneurs, Banks has had a few flops. “The failures, they rack up, man,” she says. ModelLand – a theme park on the modelling world – was an early pandemic casualty. “One of my professors at Harvard [Business School, where Banks studied management in 2012], Frances Frei, said, ‘Perfection is the enemy of results.’ I’m still grappling with that.”

There are times when Banks thinks her background as one of the world’s most famous supermodels can be a liability in business. For example, when Victoria’s Secret invited her to feature in its comeback runway last October for the first time in 19 years, at age 50 (she walked for the lingerie brand nine times between 1997 and 2005).

“One of the reasons I retired from modelling is because I thought you couldn’t be a model and also be taken seriously [in business],” she says. “That I couldn’t be an entrepreneur, or I couldn’t be an executive for television, or I couldn’t be a talk-show host talking about issues and still be a model. At the time, there wasn’t so much of the renaissance woman of today.”

It was her mother, Carolyn, who encouraged her to say yes. “She was like, ‘Look, this is not just about you returning to the runway. You’re 50, you’re curvier. When you walk that runway, women will be like, oh my God, if she can be beautiful at 50, I can do it.’”

Born in California, Banks was six years old when her parents divorced. And while her dad, Donald, was present in her and her younger brother’s lives, her mother was the primary caregiver. “It was such an example for me to be a little kid and see my mum getting herself together for work, a beautiful blazer on and amazing ’80s make-up. To be raised by this single woman, it put something serious in me.”

Smize & Dream was, in fact, inspired by her mother. When Banks was growing up in Inglewood, Los Angeles, the treat represented social mobility; each time Carolyn managed to move the family to a bigger apartment, or a fancier address, they’d celebrate with ice-cream.

During her modelling career, which she began at age 15, Banks says she always maintained a healthy relationship with food, even though she was surrounded by negative messaging.

“My job as a model was to fit into the clothes – if you don’t fit into the clothes, you don’t work,” she says. “So I would cut carbs and do certain things like that, but food was never an enemy to me.”

After more than 30 years in the business, it’s easy to forget the barriers Banks faced in a mainstream media that once only recognised white beauty. “Being a black woman and constantly being told, ‘No, you can’t do that, you can’t have that magazine cover, you can’t make that kind of money’, that really drove me,” she says. “All those doors being closed in my face, it created a passion inside of me, and then a passion to help others break through, too.”

Break through she did. In the mid-’90s, Banks was the first African-American woman on the covers of GQ, Sports Illustrated and the Victoria’s Secret catalogue. Does she ever wonder how she achieved it?

“All the time,” says Banks. “The truth is, my firsts took someone else to open that door. That’s what I’m always telling people. When I do talks or speeches at conferences, I talk to all the men in the room and I say, ‘You guys still have more power! The only way we as women are going to get there is if you think of us as your daughters and the loved ones in your life.’”

At the peak of her modelling career, Banks added acting to her CV. Her first gig was on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air in 1993, where she played Will Smith’s ex-girlfriend, Jackie. Over time, she has turned down numerous roles, something she regrets. “It wasn’t Academy Awards stuff, but they were hits … I should have just done it. What is wrong with me?” she says.

During her indefinite stay in Australia – she’s been splitting her time between Sydney and her home in New York (her other US property, in Los Angeles, was destroyed in the recent fires), she’s been pitching TV productions, including an unscripted reality show she can’t talk about yet. “Let’s just say it’s about food, darling,” she says, her voice arched again.

She’s become obsessed with Australian TV, specifically Kitty Flanagan in the ABC legal comedy Fisk and, somehow, the YouTube series Superwog. “As an American, I don’t get the social commentary, but it’s so funny to me. Somebody was telling me it’s not [politically correct]. I don’t know, because I don’t understand anything.”

I explain Australia’s immigration waves of the ’70s and ’80s to Banks, and the way ethnic comedy has become a force for the representation for marginalised cultures on television. And that she can happily embrace the “wog” part of it because it’s an example of communities reclaiming a slur to the point of self-empowerment. “Oh, like black people, same thing,” says Banks. “OK, I get it.”

Banks’ potential return to TV is intriguing. Her most successful foray, America’s Next Top Model, ran for 24 seasons between 2003 and 2018, and led to more than 50 international spin-offs (some of which are still in production). It was, however, a product of its time. To this day, viral compilations showing Banks body-shaming teenage girls over their looks and weight proliferate on TikTok as an example of the media’s problematic recipe for ratings success 20 years ago.

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Banks won’t discuss the backlash, which suggests that it either still stings or she feels she’s already apologised for it. In a 2020 Twitter post, she acknowledged the “insensitivity” and “really off choices” of past Top Model moments. In a speech last year at the Essence Black Women in Hollywood Awards, she was more ambiguous, saying, “Did we get it right? Hell no. I said some dumb shit. But I refuse to have my legacy be about some stuff linked together on the internet when there were 24 cycles of changing the world.”

Banks’ impact on TV at the turn of the millennium remains undeniable. Beyond ANTM, her daytime talk show The Tyra Banks Show, which ran from 2005 to 2010, was such a ratings phenomenon (it won two Daytime Emmys) she was regularly touted as “the next Oprah”. Did that period feel especially charmed?

“That was the most stressful time in my life,” Banks laughs. “I was filming two seasons of my reality show and 180 episodes of my talk show at the same time, and I was miserable. I was so physically tired. Toward the last season [of The Tyra Banks Show], I felt like there was a meat hook in my back. I’d be walking to the stage and the hook was pulling on me, saying stop.”

Did she pump the brakes on her talk show, or did its success peter out? “I didn’t want to tap-dance forever to make money,” she says. “I wanted to create value and opportunity for others through entrepreneurship, so that’s why I pivoted. That’s why I’ve been in Australia for so long – and people didn’t even know I was here!”

In other words, her anonymity has been hard-won. But in Sydney, she’s eager to pull back the veil a bit. “Sometimes I forget about being a public figure and just turn into a business person; now I’m trying to balance it a bit better. That’s why you see me coming out of modelling retirement, realising that I still have that part of myself and that I can exercise it.”

Sydney has played its part in helping the supermodel rekindle her smize. “There’s a nice, beautiful solace here,” says Banks. “I love home and I love New York City, but Sydney is pulling my heart. It’s got a hold on me hard.”

Stylist, Nadene Duncan; Hair, Richi Grisillo; Make-up, Justin Henry using Patrick Ta Beauty; Styling assistant, Masie Dunlop; Hair assistant Anika Hrstic.

STOCKISTS Balmain; Bianca Spender; David Jones; Elka Collective; Epic Office Furniture; High Heel Jungle; Hublot; Lee Mathews; Nancy Ganz; Noah the Label; Oroton; Scanlan Theodore; Wolford; Zara

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