Gigi Hadid, the supermodel of the Instagram age who learned to step out of frame

Gigi Hadid

Photo: Eva Rinaldi / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 23, 1995 Los Angeles
Occupation	Model
Awards	British Fashion Awards — International Model of the Year · The Daily Front Row — Model of the Year · Glamour Women of the Year

At the end of Pierpaolo Piccioli’s first couture show for Balenciaga in Paris this summer, the last model came out almost hidden: a black hood of rooster feathers closed around her head and left only the face. It was Gigi Hadid, and the look suited her better than most of the guests in that courtyard would have guessed. For most of the past decade she was the model the public saw more often than any other, a career built in full view on a phone screen. What she has done since becoming a mother is quieter and more deliberate. She now chooses the frames she steps into, and the closing look of a couture debut was one of them.

The visibility started almost before she could choose it. Jelena Noura Hadid grew up on a ranch in Santa Barbara, the first of three children born to Mohamed Hadid, a Palestinian-American real-estate developer, and Yolanda Hadid, a Dutch former model who later became a regular on reality television. Paul Marciano, a co-founder of Guess, spotted her as a toddler, and her first pictures were Baby Guess advertisements. The nickname came from her mother, who had been called Gigi as a girl in the Netherlands; Hadid took it up at school so she would not be confused with a classmate named Helena. Her younger siblings, Bella and Anwar, followed her into modelling.

Born in Los Angeles on April 23, 1995, she captained the volleyball team at Malibu High School and was an equestrian before graduating in 2013. She moved to New York to study criminal psychology at The New School, then put the course on hold once she signed with IMG Models. In February 2014 she made her New York Fashion Week debut for Desigual, and that same month Carine Roitfeld put her on the cover of CR Fashion Book, an early sign that the girl from the catalogue ads had the attention of fashion’s most exacting editors.

The acceleration came in 2015. The Daily Front Row named her Model of the Year in January, Maybelline signed her as an ambassador, and she shot the Pirelli Calendar before walking for Chanel and Marc Jacobs. She also turned up in Taylor Swift‘s Bad Blood video, a cameo that put her face in front of an audience that never reads a fashion magazine. That December she walked her first Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. A year later she had earned her wings there, and Donatella Versace handed her the International Model of the Year award at the British Fashion Awards. Her four-season collaboration with Tommy Hilfiger, sold as Gigi by Tommy Hilfiger, put her name on the label as well as the campaign.

What separated her from the supermodels of the nineties was the channel. Hadid belonged to the first generation of models whose bookings were measured partly in followers, and she handled the medium like an insider. She photographed the Versus Versace campaign herself, with her then-boyfriend Zayn Malik among her subjects, and filled a special edition of V Magazine with Polaroids of friends and colleagues. In March 2017 she appeared on four Vogue covers in a single month, among them the first issue of Vogue Arabia, a cover with particular weight for a model who talks openly about her father’s Palestinian roots. By then she was among the highest-paid models in the world.

The same openness made her a target, and not always unfairly. The standing complaint was that the career had been inherited rather than earned: a Guess campaign before she could read, a famous father, a mother on television. Hadid’s answer was work rate. In one season of 2016 she opened five shows and closed seven across New York, Milan and Paris. The stumbles, though, were her own. Hosting the American Music Awards in November 2016, she did an impression of Melania Trump that drew enough backlash for her to apologise. The following year her Chinese visa for the Victoria’s Secret show in Shanghai was reportedly revoked after a video in which she squinted to imitate a Buddha was condemned as racist by users online in China, and she missed the show. Neither episode ended anything. Both showed how little distance she had left between a private joke and the public record.

The retreat began with her daughter. Hadid confirmed her pregnancy on a late-night talk show in April 2020 and gave birth that September, and the family spent most of its time on a farm in rural Pennsylvania, near land owned by her mother and by Bella. In October 2021 Malik pleaded no contest to harassment charges involving Yolanda Hadid, and the couple separated; they co-parent their daughter. A year later Hadid deleted her Twitter account, writing that under its new leadership the platform had become “a cesspool of hate & bigotry” and was not a place she wanted to be.

Her work since has moved towards things she owns. In September 2022 she launched Guest in Residence, a cashmere label she runs as founder and creative director, and in 2023 she co-hosted a season of Netflix‘s Next in Fashion with Tan France, judging young designers instead of wearing their clothes. The campaigns did not stop. She became the face of Rabanne’s Million Gold For Her fragrance in 2024 and a global ambassador for Havaianas in 2025, but the calendar thinned and the runway appearances became events. Her private life went the same way. She has been with Bradley Cooper since 2023 and said almost nothing about him until her April 2025 Vogue cover story, where she described meeting him at a birthday party for a mutual friend’s child.

This year shows how she now uses the runway. On July 8 she closed Piccioli’s Balenciaga couture debut, her first couture show in four years. A week later, on July 16, Victoria’s Secret announced her for its 2026 show, which had moved to Los Angeles, and on October 18 she walked at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City in sequinned wings trailing fringe, on the same bill as her sister Bella.

What comes next looks less like a booking than a test of the balance she has struck. Guest in Residence gives her a business that does not depend on her face, and the farm gives her a life the cameras cannot reach. The runway is still there when she wants it. At thirty-one, Gigi Hadid has made the move that was hardest for a model raised on Instagram: she has turned her absences into part of the work.

Tags: fashion, Bradley Cooper, models, Gigi Hadid, Bella Hadid, Guest in Residence