Pooja Mor Is The Harper’s Bazaar Arabia October 2025 Issue Cover Star

She studied engineering, but Pooja Mor had other plans – like shaking up beauty standards for a new generation of women worldwide

Pooja Mor joins me from her hotel room in Toronto. She is there for the premiere of Ballad of Small Player with her new husband, Australian movie producer Cameron Lamb, who was involved in its creation. Barefaced and beaming in a robe, it’s clear she’s come a long way from her childhood home in a quiet township in Uttar Pradesh, India.

I vividly remember when I first saw Pooja. So indelible was that moment that I commemorated it with a picture on my Instagram grid back in May 2015. I was floored by her beauty. And, as a young fashion editor in Australia, to see an editorial face from India felt like a joyous (well overdue) exclamation mark. A departure from the pervasive and homogenous brand of Bollywood beauty one was so accustomed to.

Back then, she was fresh off her international debut for Louis Vuitton in Palm Springs. When I ask her about that moment, she charmingly recounts being bewildered at being flown all the way to America “just for one show, not even a whole fashion week! I flew to LA to meet Nicolas Ghesquière – I didn’t realise his influence at the time. I did the casting. And then he said, ‘See you in Palm Springs.’ I remember being confused as to whether this meant I was confirmed or not, so waited till my agents got the official go-ahead. You never truly know till you are on the runway. When I woke up the day after the show, it felt like it was my birthday. There were so many messages of congratulations on my phone. It was as if everybody I knew from Mumbai to New York was congratulating me. I was taken aback. I started to realise I was a part of a very big show that means a lot in the industry. The enormity of it started to sink in.”

Cut to 10 years later, Pooja has been able to maintain a consistent career as both an editorial darling, gracing covers while also managing a viable commercial career. Hers is a rarefied example in an industry that increasingly favours celebrity click bait moments. What’s more, she’s not a nepo baby either. Refreshingly, there are no famous parents or reality TV stunts – hers is a story of a different type of privilege; of a small-town Indian upbringing, family values and grounding in spiritual practice. A work ethic coupled with an innate gracefulness, and a cross-cultural love story thrown in to boot. In short, a modern day fairy tale.

Pooja grew up in a small city called Bareilly, a place that she fondly remembers as humming with “the noise of India – the chaiwala, the vendors selling from the side of the road, the shops selling flowers.” She then moved an hour away from the urban buzz, to “a very quiet township. It had a lot of parks and trees. We would go biking with our friends… I remember as a kid there were a lot of picnics. We were a very tight-knit family; there was a lot of warmth, jokes – not taking yourself seriously. I grew up with a lot of beauty. When you’re a kid everything looks magical. I don’t know if it’s the case for everyone, but it felt like everything was such a fairy tale. My dad would grow things like carrots in the backyard and plant jasmine for my mum so she could wear it in her hair. They were very romantic. They were like best friends. It was a very idyllic Indian upbringing.” She jokingly apologises that having an older brother added “another layer of protection” to her life as doted-on daughter.

Taking in this romantic scene that she paints, I chuckle; it’s a refreshing perspective, given our predilection to always look for hardship in any origin story. But, as we continue to chat, it’s clear that as beautiful as she is, this was not a beauty that was reflected back to her in these formative years. “I thought I was very ugly growing up. I was teased when I had to get braces. I was very skinny. In India back then they liked a ‘healthier’ [a term commonly used to denote a fuller body shape] figure – that was thought of as attractive. They would call me ‘scissors’ because I had these long legs but a small torso. Anytime I wore jeans I would hear, ‘Here comes scissors!’” she explains.

It’s something she can shrug off now with a picture-perfect smile, but such aesthetic standards in South Asia sadly still persist, with issues like colourism still plaguing mainstream media and infecting the zeitgeist. One of the sad realities of my time in India as an editor was the indoctrination of ideals around being fair-skinned; be it beauty ads, Bollywood stars or off-hand day-to-day comments.

This was an all-too familiar notion to Pooja, but thankfully she has witnessed an evolution within the fashion scene. “There is a very strong stereotypical look that they go for, especially in all the movies. When I started modelling [in India] there were so many foreigners being booked because of this obsession with fair skin. Then not too long after I started I remember there was this change, a shift in editorial. They started to put in girls that were more ‘dusky’ or ‘wheatish’ – terms they used – and finally the industry started to promote more Indian girls.” She adds glibly however, that while things seem to have shifted, there is still work to be done. Case in point? She just saw a blockbuster, Saiyaara, that confirmed the old tropes. “Again, it’s a fair girl with a darker handsome man – kind of stereotypical.”

So how then did Pooja make the leap from living this small-town Indian life to becoming an international model? Well, like any good story, it seemed fated. Her upbringing also set the context of what she felt a successful path should look like. “My parents always talked about living ‘a respectable life’. That meant doing something smart like becoming an entrepreneur, engineer or doctor. The same way a lot of people think in India!” I laugh; my sister is a doctor and I am a lawyer by education, so we fit the cliché nicely. Modelling, as Pooja framed it, was something looked down upon. Her intelligence meant she ended up studying engineering – IT engineering; to be exact. But that was not her calling. She found herself feeling bored and restless sat behind a computer. “I wanted to go out and do physical things like dancing, or activities that involved a little bit of the outside world. I couldn’t imagine sitting behind a computer for the rest of my life. There was a fire in me but it was being tamed every day.” That fire was prescient; she entered a beauty contest on a whim while at college, won, and her days of sitting behind a screen were quickly over.

I find Pooja refreshingly down to earth when explaining the practical realities of what it meant to work in Mumbai for nine months before moving to New York. “I did okay in that I could pay rent and didn’t have to ask my parents for money. But it wasn’t like I could have a great life. It would have been a very long time before I could put a down payment on a house, and actually have any stability.” She doesn’t gloss over the facts or shy away from tricky topics, freely admitting how tireless the cycle of constant casting was. After all, she “left engineering to become a model. So I had to show my parents that I was still doing something good with my life. I put a lot of pressure on myself. I had to find ways to prove myself.”

This work ethic goes hand in hand with a strong spiritual practice, “I’m from a Hindu family and my dad taught us yoga growing up so meditation was part of our lifestyle. He would tell us to ‘spend 30 minutes with yourself every day,’ and that ‘a person who hasn’t connected with his own emotions can’t connect with this world.’ So, we had to sit with our own thoughts, reflect and then write a little diary.” Pooja has this encoded in her DNA. She cites it as being crucial in managing the peaks and troughs of her chosen path. She is also a devotee of Falun Dafa, an ancient spiritual practice originating in China. With truthfulness, compassion and tolerance as its key tenets, Pooja is vocal about this practice and uses her platform to mention it wherever she is as the “Communist government in China is against it and they have banned and been persecuting devotees for over 25 years now.”

We talk about the current South Asian cultural moment that finally sees the country being recognised as not just an economic power, but also a cultural one. Pooja adds that she’s glad “India is finally getting the recognition it deserves. Everyone’s been sourcing from India for years, especially in fashion, so it is already late given the role it’s played behind the scenes. I’m glad it’s finally coming to the forefront.” She has a global life now. Her Sydney-born husband and her split their time between Paris – where they are based – India, New York, and more generally Europe, as “spending summers in Italy is fast becoming my favourite thing.”

When asked, she is still quick to reply that home is “definitely India”, even though she moved away over 10 years ago. And with the country, its people are also firmly in the spotlight, both in the fashion scene and beyond. The perfect happily ever after to any fairy tale.

Lead Image Credits: Polychroma Serpenti Necklace in Rose Gold with Onyx, Mother-of-Pearl Elements, Rubellites and Diamonds; Polychroma Earrings in Rose Gold with Turquoise Elements, Topazes and Diamonds; Polychroma Serpenti Bracelet in Rose Gold with Kunzite, Green Tourmaline, Pink Tourmaline, Citrine Quartz, Amethyst, Aquamarines, Tanzanite, Emeralds and Diamonds; Aeterna Ring in Rose Gold with Mother-of Pearl Elements, Pink Tourmalines, Amethyst and Diamonds, POA, all Bvlgari High Jewellery; Top, Dhs7,700; Trousers, Dhs6,600, both Elie Saab

Model: Pooja Mor at Elite Models. Make-Up: Manuela Balducci at Walter Schupfer Management. Hair: Mamrez Abbasi at The Green Apple Italia. Senior Producer: Steff Hawker. Fashion Assistant: Angelina Goncharova & Serena Camperchioli

Photography by Élio Nogueira. Styling by Loizos Sofokleous.
Creative Direction by Paul Solomons

From Harper’s Bazaar Arabia’s October 2025 issue.