Julia Haart Net Worth: How Wealthy Is the Prolific Fashion Designer?

Julia Haart is the name behind a namesake shoe collection, the My Unorthodox Life Netflix reality series, and many other accomplishments throughout her storied career in the fashion industry. In the last couple of years, her success in the design world has mostly been overshadowed by her legal battles against Silvio Scaglia, her now ex-husband. Today, Julia Haart’s net worth is set at approximately $600 million.

In this post, we’ll tell you how Julia Haart, the former director of La Perla and former CEO of Elite World Group accumulated millions in her net worth.

Julia Haart’s Net Worth Breakdown:

No one except for Haart and her accountant knows her exact net worth so we combined all of the best sources and quotes to make as accurate of an estimate as possible. Note that her net worth would be dramatically lower if she is lying (or is just wrong) about owning about 50% of Elite World Group.

Julia Haart ‘s Early Life

Julia Haart was born on April 11 1971 in Moscow, Russia though that isn’t her birth name. She was named Julia Leibov and changed her name multiple times throughout her life. She’s the eldest of eight siblings from a Haredi Jewish family who emigrated to Austin, Texas when she was three.

Julia Haart attended private school in Austin and was the only Jewish student at the time. The family eventually moved to Monsey in New York to join its large Haredi community.

Once she completed her secondary education, Julia moved to Brooklyn to study at the Bais Yaakov Academy. During her time at the academy, she taught herself to sew.

When she was 18 years old, Haart changed her name to Talia Leibov. An old friend of Julia, Roselyn Feinsod, now a principal at the accounting firm of Ernst & Young shares her memories of this:

“Julia wanted a more Jewish name and she changed it to Talia when she was in high school. We even made a naming ceremony for her.”

At 19, Julia married Yosef Hendler in an arranged union and had four children with him. Haart speaks of this time as a period when she felt miserable, and at one point revealed that she weighed only 73 pounds when she left the Orthodox life.

She made a decision to leave the Orthodox Jewish community she was part of and start a new life, changing her name to Julia Haart. She fled with her daughter Miriam to protect her from ‘doing what they had done to her – trying to push her down and mold her into the flat person that they could disappear’, as she told the New York Times.

Julia Haart Net Worth: How Julia Made Her Fortune

When Julia Haart was still married to Yosef Hendler, she worked as a Judaic studies teacher at the first Jewish secondary school in Atlanta, Yeshiva Atlanta. She also secretly sold life insurance at the time.

When Haart left the Haredi community with her daughter, she immediately dove into the fashion industry. In 2013, she founded a shoe brand under her name. Slowly but surely, she found investors and built strong relationships that would later help her grow her business tremendously.

Julia describes this part of her life as follows:

“I had investors who helped me, but it was a string of miracles and meeting people. Like the person who produced my shoes, I met on an airplane. I found the factories in Italy myself, and I did the public relations, the sales—everything.”

Julia Haart’s Collaboration with La Perla

The Julia Haart shoe business was a success soon after it opened. In 2016, the young entrepreneur started collaborating with a luxury Italian swimwear and lingerie maker named La Perla. She was initially hired to help La Perla with their spring and fall accessory collections.

Soon enough, she became the creative director of the fashion house. Today, even though she no longer owns the rights to her own shoe line, her designs are still sold online.

La Perla was owned by Silvio Scaglia, a Swiss billionaire who purchased the brand at an auction for $69 million in 2013. Haart and Scaglia worked together and eventually formed a relationship. In 2019, the couple married.

While working at La Perla, Julia Haart told The Cut that she designed over 4,000 pieces in a single season, and she earned quite a bit of cash for her work (though we don’t know exactly how much). Here’s the information the fashion designer has shared with the public:

“This last season I had 250 ready-to-wear pieces, but then I had probably 3,000 or 4,000 lingerie pieces, and probably a couple of hundred beachwear pieces. So you do the math.”

As the creative director of La Perla, Julia Haart achieved quite a lot.

In 2017, she designed a bombastic dress for Kendall Jenner to wear to the Met Gala that had 85,000 crystals on it. That same year, Haart produced a La Perla runway show featuring Lindsey Wixson and Naomi Campbell.

Haart as the CEO of Elite World Group

Haart’s career continued to soar in the years following her marriage. In 2019, she joined Elite World Group, a talent management agency that Scaglia purchased in 2011. Scaglia quickly appointed her as the CEO of the company the same year.

She told The Times that:

“Silvio had been pressuring me to take over Elite for, like, nine months. I didn’t want to do it. Because in my mind, the modeling industry was young women being paraded in front of men getting told, you’re ugly, you’re fat. I wanted nothing to do with it. But he told me, ‘Look, research the industry, maybe you can change it.’”

When the couple married in 2019, Silvio took Julia’s surname, making him Silvio Scaglia Haart. His net worth is estimated at over $1 billion, which is mostly sourced from the earnings of his monolithic telecommunications operation in Italy, Fastweb.

In 2010, Silvio was one of 56 people who were arrested for laundering over 2 billion euros via fictitious phone service sales and purchases between 2003 and 2006. He spent one year in prison and under house arrest but was acquitted of tax fraud in 2013.

During her time as the CEO of Elite World Group, Julia Haart helped grow the company into a billion-dollar brand. In 2021, while she was still working at EWG, she told Women’s Health:

“When I took over the company in 2018, we were valued at $90 million, and now we are valued at over $1 billion in two years.”

The company represents over 5,000 artists, models, and actors worldwide, including Iman, Irina Shayk, and Kendall Jenner. Under Haart’s leadership, Elite World Group added a new division to focus on assisting models.

She also became the creative director of e1972, a luxury fashion brand under the EWG umbrella. In January 2022, she announced a shapewear company called Body By Julia Heart, with the ”mission to liberate women”.

In early 2022, Julia was fired from Elite World Group by her now-former husband on charges of company embezzlement and replaced as CEO by Paolo Barbieri.

Legal Cases

After about 3 years of marriage, Silvio Scaglia removed Haart from her position as the CEO of Elite Model Management, triggering a series of legal battles. Almost immediately, Haart sued Scaglia, claiming that she owned 50% of the business and this was not legal.

Scaglia shared that the reason for firing Haart was because she was misappropriating funds. More specifically, Scaglia claimed that Haart had withdrawn $850,000 without authorization while operating as the CEO of the company and countersued to try to get that money back.

A month later, Haart filed for divorce and sued Scaglia in Delaware where Freedom Holding, EWG’s parent company, is located.

Julia Haart claimed that she is a 50-50 owner of EWG. To prove this, she submitted a transfer-of-shares document that states that she owns almost half the company.

Scaglia’s lawyers claimed that the transfer was invalid and that Julia Haart owns less than 0.01% of EWG.

In August of 2022, Judge Zurn ruled that Scaglia was, in fact, a controlling shareholder at EWG and that Haart was properly terminated from her position. He also found that Haart does not own 50% of the stocks. He gave this statement:

“Upon careful review of the trial record and post-trial briefs, and for the reasons detailed in my forthcoming memorandum opinion, I find that Haart does not own fifty percent of Freedom’s preferred stock. Haart is therefore not entitled to the relief she seeks. … And for the same reasons, Scaglia is entitled to the relief he seeks in his counterclaims.”

According to TMZ, Scaglia dropped his lawsuit after making an agreement with Haart to have her drop her lawsuit to make him pay her legal fees. While Haart won’t be paying penalties, she had to cover her own legal fees for the case which were likely gargantuan.

Julia and ‘My Unorthodox Life’

Julia Haart is the subject of a Netflix documentary miniseries that aired in 2021 called ‘My Unorthodox Life’. The miniseries documents her life and decision to leave the (Orthodox) Haredi Jewish Community.

The show features Julia, Silvio Scaglia, her children, and Robert Brotherton, her best friend and business partner.

The show has seen tremendous success, but it was heavily criticized by the Orthodox Jewish Community.

Julia’s Memoir in 2022

In 2022, at a time when she still held her position as CEO, Julia wrote a memoir describing her ‘journey from a world of ‘no’ to a world of ‘yes”. The memoir hit the shelves in March 2022, but the exact earnings of the author from sales have not been released yet.

The memoir soon became a bestseller on the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. It’s an inspiring book talking about her escape from an extremist sect, and her rise from housewife to shoe designer and CEO.

What Else Does Haart Own/ Invest In?

Haart is confirmed to own (or at least use) 2 incredibly expensive assets: a Tribeca penthouse and a $132,000 Bentley.

The Tribeca Triplex Penthouse

Julia Haart is currently residing in the couple’s Tribeca triplex penthouse, the one featured in the Netflix reality series. After months of divorce and legal proceedings, Julia still resides in the luxurious $56 million Tribeca home with her children though it’s uncertain that she will be able to keep it.

In court, Haart claimed that she owns half of the apartment she shared with Scaglia because she owns half of Freedom Holdings. Despite the court’s decision, the star of My Unorthodox Life is currently still living at the property while filming the second season of her show.

Scaglia purchased the condo via an LLC in 2018, according to records. While the house is still owned by the company, Haart’s representative denies allegations of impropriety, stating the following:

“Julia is acting in full compliance with the court’s directions. Two different status quo orders have been issued — one in Delaware over Mr. Scaglia’s objections and one in the divorce proceeding. These orders allow Julia and her children to live in the penthouse, at least for now. Per both these orders, there can be no sale of the apartment’.

The $132,000 Bentley

The legal battles continue to this very day. Silvio Scaglia also filed a report with the cops, accusing his ex-wife of ‘unauthorized’ use of the company’s car, a Bentley.

Even though the cops located the car in a garage owned by Julia, the car remains in place.

EWG (and thus Scaglia) decided to terminate the lease on the vehicle though there is no indication that it was successful.

What Can We Learn From Julia Haart’s Success?

The life of Julia Haart had extraordinary highs and dramatic lows. She propelled her incredible career with her tenacity and resilience alongside great talent for entrepreneurship and design. From her roots in a strict Jewish community to a meteoric rise in the fashion world, Haart’s success can teach us many things.

First, she is a picture of courage. It’s incredibly difficult easy to leave your life behind and fight against what you think is wrong. She didn’t wallow in her struggles. Instead, she made the best of a bad situation and was able to become tremendously successful because of that determination. Julia’s transformation from a repressed life to a renowned CEO highlights her courage and strength.

Her career also shows the importance of networking in entrepreneurship. Without her ability to make connections with talented and powerful people, it’s hard to imagine that she would be as successful as she is.

Haart’s legal battles, on the other hand, are more of a cautionary tale. They remind us that mixing professional and personal relationships can be extremely messy. It also shows the importance of collecting legal documentation on vital matters. If she had the right documentation, her legal battles would have been infinitely easier.