Gigi Hadid – Top-Tier American Fashion Model

Gigi Hadid is a top-tier American fashion model who has graced numerous covers and has worked numerous runways for some of the biggest names in fashion. She started early in the modeling world and is now quite successful and widely admired having over 39 million Instagram followers.

Gigi Hadid was born on the 23rd of April 1995 in Los Angeles. She ended up being raised, however, in nearby Santa Barbara. She has an ethnicity that derives from her mother's Dutch side and her father's Palestinian-American side.

Her father's roots also mean that Gigi Hadid is a descendant of Daher Al Omer, the Prince of Nazareth and the Sheik of Galilee. She started her modeling career pretty early at only two years old. She had been discovered by a family friend Paul Marciano who was also a co-founder of Guess. It was in that vein that Gigi Hadid began striking poses at such a young age for Baby Guess, Guess Kids and Guess.

Gigi Hadid suspended her modeling career briefly to begin competitive horseback riding and club volleyball.

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Her goal was to have a normal childhood and so she went to Malibu High School where she became captain of the varsity volleyball team. She then went to The New School, a New York-based university, and began studying criminal psychology but she dropped out to turn her focus fully to a modeling career. She had already signed her first professional contract with IMG Models before starting at The New School. After dropping out, her modeling career really had the space to take off.

She made her New York Fashion Week debut in February 2014 walking in Desigual's runway show but she has pointed to appearing on the cover of fashion editor Carine Roitfeld's Spring 2014 CR Fashion Book for Spring as her big break. She next appeared alongside Patrick Schwarzenegger in July 2014 for Tom Ford's Eyewear autumn/winter campaign. The designer would go on to hire her for various other fashion and fragrance campaigns later that year.

In January 2015, Maybelline named Gigi Hadid as their brand ambassador. Gigi Hadid also encountered failure after two auditions to be a Victoria Secret's Angel ended up in a rejection. In December 2015, however, she walked the Victoria Secret's runway for the first time. She made her second appearance in the famed fashion show in 2016 and in that way officially earned her Victoria's Secret wings. Gigi Hadid became a brand ambassador for Tommy Hilfiger in 2016 and collaborated with the designer on a capsule collection. She also began walking the runway for such designers as Chanel, Versace, Marc Jacobs, Balmain and Miu Miu all in that same year. She was soon made a Reebok brand ambassador.

On the awards front, Gigi Hadid has been honored with the British Fashion Awards' International Model of the Year award and was named by the Daily Front Row as the Model of the Year. Gigi Hadid has also represented on the acting front. In 2012 she appeared in a short film called Virgin Eyes which was an American Film Institute Conservatory thesis project. In 2014 she appeared as Slay-Z in her friend Taylor Swift's Bad Blood music video. She has also appeared in the music videos of such artists as Joe Jonas, Miguel, Cody Simpson, Calvin Harris and Zayn Malik and she directed DNCE’s 2015 Cake by the Ocean video. In 2012 she made her first reality television appearance with her mother in Bravo's The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Since then she has appeared in other reality TV shows as Lip Sync Battle and Masterchef.

One of the reasons why Gigi Hadid must have come into modeling so early is the fact that modeling is surely in her blood. Her mother, Yolanda Hadid, was herself a renowned Dutch model who later even became a Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Star. Mohamed Hadid, her father was a real estate developer. Gigi Hadid has two siblings from her parent's union - a brother named Anwar Hadid and a sister named Bella Hadid. They are both also models. Gigi Hadid and Bella Hadid have walked together in the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show and have also starred alongside each other in campaigns for Fendi and Moschino in 2017. They are in fact the first siblings to both have their names on Forbes World’s Highest Paid Models list. The sisters seem pretty close as Gigi Hadid has credited Bella for being a source of her strength. The model also has two paternal half-sisters named Marielle and Alana who are older than her and five step-sisters from her mother's second marriage to David Foster. Two of her stepsisters are Erin Foster and Sara Foster who star in VH1's Barely Famous.