The story rarely starts with a casting call. Taylor Hill was fourteen, on a family riding trip at a ranch in Granby, Colorado, when the photographer and talent scout Jim Jordan spotted her — a chance encounter in 2011 that pulled a Rocky Mountain teenager straight onto Europe’s modelling circuit before she was old enough to drive. Within a few years she would be one of the youngest Victoria’s Secret Angels in the brand’s history, a Lancôme face, and one of the defining models of fashion’s Instagram era. Hers was the rare modern career that ran the full arc — from a small-town teenager to a global Angel to, more recently, a brand founder — without ever quite leaving the spotlight she stumbled into at fourteen.
From a Colorado ranch to the runway
Taylor Marie Hill was born on 5 March 1996 in Palatine, Illinois, and raised in Arvada, Colorado. After Jordan discovered her at fourteen, she signed with IMG Models and was being flown to Europe for jobs before she was fifteen. She left high school at fifteen to model full-time and earned her GED the following year. Her commercial start came early — an Intimissimi catalogue in 2013, followed by Forever 21 and H&M — but her defining break was Victoria’s Secret.
The work: an Angel at eighteen
Hill walked her first Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show in 2014, the youngest model in that year’s rotation, and in 2015 she was awarded her Angel wings, making her one of the youngest Angels of her era. She remained a fixture of the brand, walking the show through its 2018 edition — alongside veterans like Adriana Lima and Candice Swanepoel — which proved to be the last of that era before the broadcast was discontinued. Around the Angel years she became one of high fashion’s most-booked faces, walking for Versace, Valentino, Chanel, Armani and Marc Jacobs, and fronting campaigns for the likes of Fendi, Michael Kors, Jimmy Choo and Topshop. The crown jewel of her beauty business arrived in July 2016, when the French house Lancôme named her a new face — among the youngest the brand had ever signed — and editorially she appeared across many international editions of Vogue.
What set Hill apart in those years was a classic, all-American beauty the industry had momentarily drifted away from — a throwback to the supermodel archetype just as a new wave of more idiosyncratic faces was rising around her. She became a kind of anchor for Victoria’s Secret in particular, the dependable, camera-ready Angel a brand built on glossy spectacle could always rely on, and the sheer volume of her bookings across runway, beauty and editorial in the mid-2010s was the mark of a model the whole industry wanted at once. For a few years she was almost inescapable — her face on billboards, on magazine covers and on the most-watched fashion broadcast on television — a level of saturation very few models of any generation ever reach, and fewer still reach so young.
The Instagram-era supermodel
Hill arrived just as social media rewrote the rules of modelling, and she became one of the first “Instagram-era” supermodels — a transition figure between the old supermodel guard and the influencer generation that followed. A vast online following became part of her professional value in a way it never had been for the models before her, and she built a parallel screen career too, appearing in films including Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon (2016) and Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (2022). She is a member of the Business of Fashion’s BoF 500, its index of the people shaping the global industry.
That timing mattered. Hill came up at the precise moment when a model’s reach was migrating from the printed page to the phone, and she was among the first to be valued as much for the size of her audience as for the quality of her walk. It made her a bridge between two eras of the business — the last generation of models made by magazines and runways, and the first made, in part, by social media — and it gave her a direct line to millions of followers that the supermodels before her had never had with the public. The career an earlier model would have built entirely through editors and casting directors, she built partly in full view of her own audience.
The Private Side
Hill met the venture-capital and private-equity investor Daniel Fryer in 2019 at a jazz festival in Aspen. The couple became engaged in 2021 and married on 10 June 2023 in Colorado, near the mountains where she grew up. The pair have leaned into a public “couple” identity, co-fronting a jewellery campaign together in 2025 that Hill called her most personal work to date. She keeps her private life otherwise low-key, a stable, low-drama marriage that stands in contrast to the relentless public exposure of her modelling years.
Earnings and net worth
Concrete, attributable figures are limited. The most reliable single data point comes from Forbes, which ranked Hill among the world’s highest-paid models in the mid-2010s. Beyond that, the net-worth numbers that circulate are estimates from celebrity-finance aggregators rather than audited figures, sitting in the single-digit millions and varying from one source to the next; they should be read as approximate. Her income has spanned runway and campaign work, her Lancôme and Victoria’s Secret contracts, editorial covers, and, increasingly, her own business ventures.
Where she is now
Hill has pivoted toward ownership. In 2025 she co-founded the fine-jewellery brand Stone Fruit with her sister Mackinley, its debut collection arriving that autumn. She continues to model and act, remains a BoF 500 name, and — between the jewellery launch and the campaign with her husband — is building a portfolio that increasingly emphasises founder and entrepreneur over runway alone. More than a decade after a stranger noticed her on a Colorado ranch, the teenager who left school at fifteen to chase a long shot has become both a fixture of the industry and, now, a builder of her own businesses within it.