Gigi Hadid has spent the past ten years zipping around the world being shot for magazine covers and walking catwalks for the biggest fashion houses. She has more than 76 million followers on Instagram and an estimated £24 million in the bank — and yet, at the age of 27, the thing she really longs for is a regular nine-to-five gig. Is she mad?
“Yeah,” she laughs when we meet in a New York photo studio on a freezing January morning. “I’m craving the office job!” Modelling, she explains, involves showing up to “a new job every day with a completely different set of people”. It’s an itinerant way of life that she is now ready to exchange for a more “settled feeling”. “I think it’s unrealistic to see modelling as my lifestyle for ever,” she adds, her voice deep and staccato.
This desire for routine was one of the motivations behind the recent launch of Gigi’s first company, a luxury cashmere brand called Guest in Residence. Prices range from £199 for turtleneck jumpers to an eye-popping £424 for jogging bottoms like the khaki ones she’s wearing today, along with an oversized black leather jacket and a web of gold necklaces. She has also secured a new TV presenting role on the second series of Netflix’s fashion design competition show, Next in Fashion, which started streaming on Friday. Gigi has taken over from Alexa Chung as a host alongside Queer Eye’s Tan France. “I didn’t go into it like, ‘I’m your superior,’ ” Gigi says of her conversations with the contestants. “It’s more like, ‘I’m your buddy. These are the cool and crazy things I’ve seen in fashion. I loved showing up to the same studio every day for a month with the same crew. I could get to know people. The Guest in Residence office [in Manhattan] is the same for me.”
Warm, funny and self-possessed, Gigi handles herself with a maturity that belies her age. But then this is a woman whose life has unfolded on an accelerated timeline ever since she landed her first modelling job (for Baby Guess; the brand’s co-founder was a friend of her mother’s) at just two years old. By the age of 21, Gigi had already transcended fashion to become a pop culture force (in 2015, she co-directed the music video for DNCE’s smash hit Cake by the Ocean with Joe Jonas, her boyfriend at the time and the band’s lead singer). At 25 she became a mother to Khai, the daughter she shares with her ex-boyfriend Zayn Malik, the singer and former One Direction member.
“She has already given me so much,” Gigi says of Khai, now two. “I always wanted to be a mum, but I was never obsessive about it or [thought that] I was put on this Earth to be a mum. I’ve always been quite organised, so having Khai at the time that I did was a blessing. I’m so glad to be a young mum.”
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Gigi gave birth at her family’s £3.2 million, 32-acre Pennsylvania farm. She often spends time there with her mother, Yolanda Hadid, a Dutch-born former model and the ferociously ambitious former star of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (Gigi’s parents divorced when she was five; her father is the Palestinian-born property mogul Mohamed Hadid). With its horses, goats and chickens, the farm provides Gigi — who splits her time between Pennsylvania and a Manhattan apartment — with a secluded escape where she can ramble around with Khai and play backgammon with her sister, Bella, and brother, Anwar, both of whom are, of course, successful models in their own right.
Time on the farm also means a respite from the New York paparazzi who trail Gigi around the city. “For a long time they made me shy away because I was really sick of seeing my own face or feeling like I had to get dressed for this thing that I couldn’t control,” she says carefully. “It’s still a bit suffocating to look out your window and be like, ‘Shit, they’re there again.’ The only thing that really bothers me is if it’s going to take away from me trying to experience things with my daughter because I’m trying to protect her from that.”
For the first year of Khai’s life, Gigi and Zayn made their own home in a farmhouse not far from her family’s ranch. In 2021, however, the couple split following claims by Yolanda that Zayn “shoved” her into a dresser during an argument. Zayn denied the allegations and later pleaded no contest (meaning that he wouldn’t fight charges) to four counts of harassment. A judge put him on probation and ordered him to take an anger management course.
While Gigi doesn’t explicitly mention Zayn’s name during our conversation, she alludes to him in a loving tone that implies a genuine lack of acrimony. “Just keeping the importance of the child’s happiness at the forefront,” she replies when I ask what her advice would be to those navigating co-parenting arrangements. “You have a long life alongside this person.” Gigi attempts to schedule work commitments “when Khai is with her dad. That she can be with both parents makes me very happy,” she says.
Born Jelena Noura Hadid, Gigi grew up in various wealthy enclaves of California. Zayn, meanwhile, was raised in Bradford. Gigi lights up when she talks about “the little bits” of her daughter that are British. “She’s clearly a child who was grown in my stomach eating a lot of British food — breakfast, beans, curries. And she still eats like that. She even says some words with a little [English] accent, which I love.”
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Gigi’s own childhood was carefree and outdoorsy. “My mum would be in the office doing work for an hour so I was roaming around, doing a concert for myself in the living room or playing volleyball.” Her late-teenage years coincided with her mother’s stint on The Real Housewives and while she and Bella have recalled frequent attempts to avoid the cameras, the beginnings of their careers were inevitably chronicled on the show.
“Technically I’m a nepotism baby,” Gigi says, pre-empting my question. “My parents came from very little” — her father fled to Syria with his parents in 1948 during the Arab-Israeli war — “[but] I’ve always acknowledged that I come from privilege. My parents told me, ‘Just because you have parents who were successful, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t walk into the job being as nice and as hard-working as you can be.’ ”
It was when, after high school, she moved to New York to study criminal psychology that Gigi’s modelling career exploded. Within a year she was on the catwalk for big-name brands and yet, alongside the excitement, she recalls an intense pressure to conform to a narrow definition of beauty.
“When I started out I was a heavily trained volleyball player and I had a certain body type from that. At that time fashion hadn’t started to get into a more inclusive body-image conversation. I was probably harder on my body than I should have been. I wasn’t starving myself but I was very routined. Since then I’ve got into this idea of body neutrality. I love my body for what it has done but I’m not obsessed with it.”
All pillowy cheeks and lips, Gigi had arrived for our interview with a face scrubbed clean of make-up and damp hair in a top knot. “I don’t think I’m the prettiest person in the world,” she says. I examine her voice and face for faux modesty but detect none. “Some Botox could probably help but I’m not so obsessed with caring that I want to do anything about it.”
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As Gigi’s profile grew, so too did her confidence in speaking out on controversial sociopolitical issues. Unsurprisingly given her heritage, she is vocally pro-Palestine (a stance that has made her the focus of online pile-ons) and last year she publicly took on Kanye West after he lashed out at her friend Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, a Vogue fashion editor and stylist, who had criticised the appearance of tops printed with the words “White Lives Matter” at the rapper’s latest YZY show. “This is not a fashion person”, West captioned an Instagram photo of Karefa-Johnson. “You wish u had a percentage of her intellect,” Gigi fired back in the comments. “You’re a bully and a joke.”
Why did Gigi get involved? “[Gabriella] is a really important person for people to see in fashion,” she says. “There are millions of kids who will benefit from knowing that Gabriella is a celebrated and deserving person in this industry. I found [West’s comment] not only malicious but also dangerous.”
Away from work, Gigi surrounds herself with a formidable army of female friends that includes Serena Williams and Taylor Swift (she describes the latter as “really creative, thoughtful, caring, inspiring”). Gigi, who has recently been romantically linked with Leonardo DiCaprio, is candid about the challenges of forging a committed relationship when your private life is consistently dissected online. “I don’t know how anyone expects anybody they see in the public eye to have any sort of normal dating experience if you tie people [to one another] so quickly. It’s a bummer. I just stopped reading it.”
In the near future she would like to try her hand at acting. “I’ve gotten offers for movie roles over the years,” she shrugs. “But I would never want it to be a role that people expect of me.” Whether it’s clocking into an office job or taking the big screen by storm, Gigi has ambitions to do it all. I wouldn’t bet against her.
Next in Fashion is available on Netflix
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Styling: Natasha Royt. Hair: Bob Recine at the Wall Group. Make-up: Carolina Gonzalez at A-Frame Agency. Nails: Mei Kawajiri at 13 Market Management. Set design: Griffin Stoddard at Streeters. Local production: Art Department
