Gigi Hadid, The face of a new generation of cover star that is redefining global fame. In our exclusive interview with the supermodel she tells Paul Flynn what it's like being Gigi. Here are some clips from the interview.
‘I was always told as a kid,’ says Gigi Hadid, ‘that you need five Vogue covers to be a supermodel. I don’t know if I consider myself a supermodel but that was what I was told you need to do.’ She begins counting hers from the last 12 months off on one hand. We meet in November, two days before the release of her fifth. ‘There was Italia, Netherlands, Brazil, Spain,’ she says. ‘There’s another one. I’m forgetting. I think I got six, shooting another tomorrow, another comes out in a couple of weeks in the UK. Crazy, right?’
As her Victoria Secrets debut was nearing and when the press critiqued her catwalk walk, the likes of DVF, Carine Roitfeld and Donatella Versace were quick to jump to her defence. She remembers:
"The debate about Gigi’s walk was finally resolved in her head in a Milan hotel corridor by Naomi Campbell. ‘I was with Naomi a couple of weeks before the VS show,’ she explains. ‘She said, “Don’t apologise, don’t do it. You are perfect the way you are. Everyone said my walk was weird too.”’ Gigi’s life motto, one that seems to be working out just great for now, is ‘work hard, be nice, make a friend’. Naomi invited Gigi to her hotel for a quick workshop. ‘I was like, OK. I go to her hotel and we end up practising walking in the hallway of the hotel. Italian families are coming out to watch and she’s like, “Don’t look at them, keep walking, they’re your audience.” The elevator would open and the waiter would come out – “Don’t look at him, he’s your audience, do a spin and keep going.” It was terrifying, walking in front of this Italian grandmother and her kid. After getting a lot of different opinions about my past Fashion Week I went into the VS show thinking, “Yeah. Maybe I am different, but I have heard Naomi saying, ‘b*tch better have my money after I walked for her.’ So it’s going to be fine.” If people don’t like how I walk then they don’t have to watch.' "
On her meteoric rise to fame and how to deal with it, she turns to her friends, you might recognise one of two of them..
"When Gigi has a problem online, she has more than her Mothers in Fashion to turn to. She has her friends. ‘We define a troll,’ she says, ‘as someone that’s hiding behind their computer, putting out negativity and not realising that their words are actually words and that we’re actually people that are reading them.’ At times like this, it’s handy to know a few others whose online approval rates into the multimillions. ‘We cope with the trolls by having each other,’ she says of her formidable friendship group. ‘It’s the same thing as dating someone within the industry rather than out of the industry. You only understand it when you’re literally experiencing it. When people are really harsh? I live with my best friend from high school but usually I’m going to call Kendall because Kendall’s the one who will always be like, “You don’t need that, just let it go.” And I know that if that’s working for her then it can work for me.’
What's important for her, is prioritising her female friendships. ‘I think that that’s the big one. It’s not just us, it’s a lot of women in the entertainment industry that are really supporting each other and showing that it’s less cool to be mean than it is to be nice. I think that that’s a very unique thing to our generation.’
Exerts from Paul Flynn's interview with Gigi in this issue of LOVE.
