Alice McNally
Is Too Cool
to Post

Her agents can attest to this, as it’s precisely how they signed her. Chloe Mackey of No Agency and her cofounder, Alex Tsebelis, were at Balthazar on Christmas Day a couple of years ago when they saw her walk into the Soho landmark owned by her father, the restaurateur and rabble-rouser Keith McNally. “We were like, ‘Oh my God, that’s Alice McNally,’” Mackey recalls. “We had obviously seen her on Keith’s Instagram.”

The duo sprung into action and sent a request to follow McNally’s private account, which she approved while they were sitting across the dining room. After sliding into her DMs, they learned that she had just signed with another, more commercial agency, and was therefore off the market. But they kept in touch, and a few weeks later, McNally applied to an ad No Agency placed looking for a “hot intern.” She got the job, and as any agents worth their salt would do, they figured out a way to get her out of the other contract. “The rest is history,” McNally says.

When McNally was initially scouted by that first agency, she was living in Oahu, Hawaii, as a teenager, going to school and working at a bikini shop. “It was through my friend’s Instagram; she was signed with them and she posted a photo of us together,” she remembers. (McNally was born in New York, moved to London at six, and then to Hawaii after her parents’ divorce at 15, where her mom lives.)

Since joining No Agency, McNally has shot for buzzy clients like SKIMS, Eckhaus Latta, raimundo langlois, and Los Angeles Apparel, but has kept a low profile. Though Instagram kickstarted her career, McNally is relatively offline; most of the information available about her on social media is via her dad’s lengthy, sometimes unfiltered, Instagram captions. This is something of an anomaly in the industry, which often requires that models have high follower counts in order to secure castings and book blue-chip jobs. She claims that she’s just not into posting, but her lack of a digital footprint seems at least partially by design, adding to her air of mystery.

Soft spoken with a slight British accent, McNally is almost suspiciously chill. During our conversation, she’s prone to long pauses, her big brown eyes turning away, sipping her black coffee and waiting for me to break the silence first. “I’ve shot her twice, and I feel like I do not know her at all,” Richard Kern says over the phone a few days after my meeting with her. “That’s nice for a model because she remains mysterious, and she looks mysterious in photos, which is kind of a big, giant plus.” When she’s in front of his camera, he knows he’ll get good stuff no matter what. “Usually when I’m shooting someone, I’m talking to them; I come away from the shoot and I know quite a bit about them. But [with McNally], I know zero.”

From Mackey’s perspective, it’s often preferable for a model to leave a lot to the imagination, especially in this era of oversharing. “For what we do and the way we pitch the talent, no social media is sometimes the best social media,” she explains. “We try to teach all of our talent: You are going to be friendly and great on set, but you need to have a certain level of inaccessibility, which is what people are going to want to latch on to you in some way.” However, this became a point of contention when McNally wouldn’t share her Eckhaus Latta Snap bag ads, shot by Michael Hauptman, late last year; the photos were so exquisite, people got upset, thinking that McNally was AI-generated. Tsebelis urged her, but McNally stood firm: “I’m not doing that!”

With this free-spirited, mischievous attitude, it comes as no surprise that McNally is the baby of her family. She’s the youngest of her dad’s five children, with three half-siblings from his first marriage. Her mom, Alina, modeled a bit, as did her half-sister Isabelle, an actor who was featured in an Urban Outfitters campaign and on the cover of Jalouse magazine in the late 2000s; she was also a downtown nightlife fixture and Tumblr muse, frequently appearing in photos from Misshapes, The Selby, and The Cobrasnake. “I think she’s the most beautiful person in the entire world, I am in awe of her,” Alice says of Isabelle. “Like, how are we related—especially through Keith? It doesn’t make any sense to me,” she deadpans.

“Although I’ve never actually encouraged Alice to be a model, I’ve never discouraged it either,” Keith writes in an email. “Despite being good friends with Anna Wintour, I know very little about the fashion world. The few times I’ve seen Alice’s face in a magazine I turn green with envy! Why her? Why not me?? Of course, I’m joking. I actually feel quite proud of Alice.” (Another of Keith’s famous pals is Lorne Michaels; they’re so close, in fact, that Alice is named after Lorne’s wife.)

McNally moved around a lot when she was very young—mainly between the ages of 11, when her dad had a stroke, and 14, when her parents split up—though New York feels like home. “Life wasn’t so easy for Alice during those years,” her father continues. “I consider it an absolute miracle that Alice turned out so intelligent and levelheaded.” She has fond memories of going to elementary school in the West Village a couple of blocks away from her childhood home on 11th Street. As a tween in the UK, she went to military school, which was very strict. “They would send us to these camps for weeks . . . we would sleep in these barracks on a tiny, tiny little mattress, a sleeping bag, wake up at five in the morning, go do drills every day, shoot [guns],” she recalls. “This fucking camp, it was crazy! There were all these juvie kids who would come in, who were also staying there . . . they would come into the dining hall at dinner time in, like, handcuffs.” She later attended an international high school in London, where kids famously grow up quickly and party hard: “We’re exposed to so much so young. Everyone is, like, on steroids,” she says.

She touched down in Hawaii just shy of her sixteenth birthday, which happened to fall on her first day of school on the island. “I think when I went to Hawaii, other kids were freaked out—I think they were like, ‘She’s a fucking freak, this girl is so weird.’ Going from that environment [in London] to Hawaii where these kids had never had a sip of alcohol, never hit a vape,” she recalls.

Living in London during her formative years influenced her personal style, specifically how she plays around with colors and patterns: Today she’s wearing a vintage patchwork leopard-print coat with red, super low-rise pants and a studded black leather belt—a sort Avril Lavigne by way of Shoreditch situation. Shades of Hawaii come through in her long, sun-streaked brown hair, worn in loose waves as if air-dried after an ocean swim.

Like every 20-something in New York City, McNally is trying to find her footing, living alone in a Chinatown apartment with her cat, Charlie, pulling late nights at Paul’s Baby Grand or Casablanca; but unlike most 20-somethings in New York City, she’s hometown royalty, and grew up frequenting her dad’s revered establishments: Balthazar, Pastis, Morandi, The Odeon (which is now owned by his first ex-wife), and Minetta Tavern, where our shoot took place. She remembers spotting Taylor Swift there one night, hanging out with Phoebe Bridgers.

“I just love everyone who works there,” McNally says. “I grew up around so many of the waitresses and the waiters, they’re like an extension of our family.”

Asking about her career aspirations, I bring up a post of her dad’s from 2021 that mentions a meeting he’d set up for her with Wintour when she was 16 to get advice on art and fashion schools. “She advised me to go to Central Saint Martins,” she recalls. “Obviously I didn’t take her advice, but there's still time.” That was back when she was interested in making clothes, but the more she’s around that part of the business—her day job is assisting in a multibrand fashion showroom—the less she wants to do it. Marketing piques her interest, but the physicality of fashion design is not for her: dimensions, patternmaking. “I realized I am really bad at math . . . I don’t think I could ever do it, like that’s insane,” she says.

In the short term, McNally is focused on strengthening her relationships with regular clients like SKIMS—she loves the team, the manicures, and the Squirl catering—and hopefully forming some new ones abroad. Mackey tells me they’re currently fielding offers from agencies in Korea for her to spend a month or two there over the summer. “They really love her in Korea, she’s already shot for a few Korean brands . . . she’s really in demand and there’s a little bit of a bidding war going on,” she says.

If you want to follow along with McNally’s globetrotting adventures in real time, you might be out of luck—that is, unless the elder McNally keeps up his regular posting cadence. I ask Keith whether Alice has ever objected to any of the “really, really embarrassing” photos he’s posted of her on Instagram, which include lots of baby pictures, close-up portraits, and ghosts of boyfriends past. “Not so far,” he replies. “But there’s still plenty of time.”

McNally does appear uniquely unflappable and aloof—inscrutable, even. (She jokes that it’s her aloha vibe.) Kern can remember the first time he clocked it, too. He was shooting McNally for the weed paraphernalia brand Fortune World and was floored by how much she smoked that day. “I kept saying, are you getting stoned? She just smoked pot the entire time,” Kern says. “And I was stoned, I wouldn’t even smoke it. It was so much smoke. And she said, ‘No, no. I don’t even feel it.’”

Alyssa Vingan is a writer, editor, and host of The New Garde, a podcast about the future of the fashion and beauty industries.