Lucy Van Ellis / Elite World GroupSome people have jobs so cool we'd actually enjoy attending their marathon Zoom meetings. Even the ones that could totally have been an email.
Not to say we don't cherish our all-important responsibility of bringing you every last piece of need-to-know information about the casts of Bridgerton and The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, but we don't have our own glam squad or a Rolodex filled with famous names, now do we?
But the impossibly cool people we'll be profiling in E! News' latest series totally do. Plus access to things like private drivers, designer garb and the type of professional titles we'd drop with wild abandon at parties, dinner dates or while chatting with the barista at Starbucks. Welcome to A Day in the Life...
Ever wanted Kendall Jenner to attend your dinner party? Uh, duh. Well now you can. You know, if you have the money. And she agrees to it. And a few other key details. But at least now it's in the realm of possibility thanks to Julia Haart's brainchild.
Determined to completely transform the industry, the CEO and co-owner of Elite World Group (as in the brand behind top talent like Jenner, Cindy Crawford, Iman, etc.) was looking for a way to put more power in her models' hands.
The answer was to launch EWG Virtual, creating "the most hyper-realistic avatars you've ever seen," she explains. "They walk, they talk, you can see the pores in their skin, you can see literally every minute detail. And they have artificial intelligence built in."
Which means, while some of her contemporaries were fretting that a virtual-reality experience could replace the real deal, Julia was imagining the possibilities of what these new avatars could do. "Instead of just walking one runway, Jasmine Sanders can walk 14 runways simultaneously in 14 different countries, because your avatar doesn't need a hotel room, and doesn't need to travel," she explains. "It also enables our talent to go into spaces that they would never be able to do. We can have people in video games. We could have the talent taking you shopping through a website. I mean, the opportunities are endless."
Most importantly, she says of her talent, "It's another way to help them monetize what they're doing and to give them financial independence and control. And that's the goal, that's what I want."
Having spent four decades in the most controlled of environments—the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community—the mom of four was shocked to enter the very secular world of fashion and business only to discover that women weren't faring all that much better.
She was inspired to launch EWG, she shares, "because I saw the talent now could have the power." With an assist from the right producers, directors and videographers, she notes, they can transform themselves into a full-on brand. "They don't need to wait for someone to choose them or like their look," she says. "They don't need to stand in a line and be told, 'Oh, you're too tall, too fat, too short, too this, too that.' It's in their hands now because they can go directly to the people."
That same drive to create change propelled her to share her unique story on the new Netflix reality series, My Unorthodox Life, despite a schedule so jam-packed that when asked what time she wraps for the day she jokes, "Two in the morning?"
As she prepares to model her next big invention, she and chief operating officer Robert Brotherton (the Nigel to her far more reasonable Miranda Priestly, "we pretty much finish each other's sentences," says Julia) walk E! News through a typical day.
5 a.m. (EST) "An early riser," Julia wakes and gets to strutting. "There's lots to do," she explains. Like, ping Robert, for instance. "I tend to send people emails at 4 in the morning, assuming, of course, they'll read it when they wake up at a normal time," she notes.
Asked the earliest he's received one of her missives, Robert jokes, "I don't think we can say what's early. Is it early? Is it late? We don't know. This woman's working 24 hours a day, so I'm always on the lookout. I've got a special alert on my phone. If I get buzzed several times, it makes a louder noise and then I know it's something we need to urgently tackle. So that's how the two of us work—very hand-in-hand."
5:30 a.m. You think you like your coffee a latte? "During COVID I was so stressed about not getting my Starbucks, that we literally recreated Starbucks in my home," Julia admits. "I have the Starbucks capsules, I've got the Starbucks syrup. I've got the Starbucks cinnamon thing."
Every single morning she whips up a non-fat, skinny cinnamon dolce latte—ideally in her monogrammed Starbucks cup: "That's pretty much the only thing that is consistent about my day."
6:30 a.m. Waking up in his apartment uptown, Robert first checks his phone "to see if I have any WhatsApps from my dearest friend Julia," then it's time to tend to his other bestie, treating bernedoodle Richard to a walk through Central Park. Cracks Robert, "He's got to pee and poop somewhere."
9 a.m. As Julia takes Manhattan, running around to appointment after appointment ("Everybody knows to WhatsApp because I tend to get, like, 400,000 emails a day"), Richard settles into EWG's midtown offices overlooking the Hudson River. "Julia is out there really driving the business—I'm behind the scenes working in Excel, and going through all the kind of nitty gritty," he notes.
Each morning kicks off with a breakfast meeting with some of their European counterparts "because of course we have offices in London and Milan and Paris, in Spain and Amsterdam and Copenhagen," Richard says. "We're constantly touching base with not only our teams on the ground but also our talent, who are based in those spaces because of course we represent 6,000 talent around the world, and we like to keep in touch with everyone."
12 p.m. Like any good Jewish mother, "I'm always worried about people being hungry," Julia admits. "I'm constantly feeding people." So even on the craziest of days, "We always take a little bit of time to have lunch, have nice conversation, and then get back to it," says Robert.
Julia tends to order in for the group—something spicy, heavy on the onions—and then they all gather around her signature red chair. "It definitely smells terrible," she admits. "We're always airing out my room. My balcony is a nightmare." Agrees Robert, "Lunch is at 12, air out is at, like, 12:35. Luckily she has a nice balcony off of her office."
1 p.m. Her model moment: Julia blocks off a two-hour chunk in her day to build her own avatar. "Mine is a good three inches taller than me and has way more time for working out," she jokes. "My avatar is so fit it's ridiculous."
Usually, though, says Robert, their afternoons are in tandem. "We're working on the same project and doing kind of different things for that project," he explains. That might mean she's sitting in on a fitting for Body by Haart + Lieu, her new shapewear line that "literally looks like lingerie," while he's working on a launch strategy with the marketing team.
"I'm scurrying a little bit before each meeting to make sure that everything's prepped and ready so that we're really efficient and we get through all of the information," Robert notes. "And maybe in the background, I'm filing the trademark applications with our attorneys and doing some executional things while Julia is making those big decisions."
8 p.m. Ain't no dinner party like a Julia Haart dinner part. A fan of writer Gertrude Stein and her Paris salon, "I'm trying to recreate the whole salon intellectual, where people just get together and share ideas," she explains. "People from different walks of life, different kinds of art, different kinds of expression, different kinds of fields of endeavor can all get together and share their dreams and thoughts."
The guest list is "the most eclectic group of people you could possibly imagine," raves Robert. "On one side of the table you'll have some Nobel laureate, on another side of the table you'll have some genetic engineer who's just discovered how to, like, stop you from aging. And then a granddaughter of some Russian czar."
11:30 p.m. The city never sleeps, but sometimes Julia does. "Whatever time I'm going to bed, whether it's 2 or 3 or 11 or 9, I do need 45 minutes that I don't look at emails or I can't sleep," she notes of settling in with a good book. "If I start focusing on emails again, there's just no sleep, because my mind won't shut off."
Besides, there's always time for emailing in the morning. And even if Robert doesn't wake to a message from Julia, he has no problem getting in her head. "I've always enjoyed working with Julia because it's easy to anticipate her needs," he says. "She's so logical and she gives such clear and decisive direction, so it's very easy to kind of execute and implement when you know exactly the goal and the vision for whatever project you're working on."
Proving their praise goes both ways, Julia responds to that compliment with one of her own. "You're the best," she raves. "He's the best." Jokes Robert, "I know."