Gigi Hadid: ‘My Thighs Were Huge’
A selfie from 22-year-old model Gigi Hadid. (Photo: Instagram)
When Kate Moss burst on to the scene in the 90s, she was considered the anti-supermodel. She was seen as waifish and short in comparison to Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell who dominated the runways at the time. Today, most runway models resemble an early Moss, so when the athletic and curvy Gigi Hadid entered the world of photo shoots and runways, she struggled to find management in New York City.
“When I first went to visit different agencies in New York, a lot of them were like, you have to lose a lot of weight,” Hadid told the Daily Mail Australia. “I would cry at night and my mom [Yolanda Foster] would be like, “We’re going to find the [right] people.” As a student at Malibu High, Hadid was captain of the varsity volleyball team and competed in horseback riding. “My thighs were huge, they were like rock!” Hadid recalled. “I had like crazy muscles […] and it was crazy but at the time I didn’t care what my body looked like, I just wanted to be the best volleyball player I could be so it didn’t really matter to me.”
Gigi Hadid shooting the Seafolly campaign. (Photo: Instagram)
These days, Hadid admits that she’s had to slim down for certain jobs, and she told the Daily Mail Australia that she does the Master Cleanse — the infamous lemonade and cayenne pepper cleanse once praised by Beyoncé — when the need comes up. “You need to find things that are still a healthy way of doing it and for some jobs that’s just the best way to do it unless you start six months in advance… I personally would rather do the Master Cleanse for ten days than just eat salad for six months.”
Since signing with IMG in 2011, Hadid has been successful in more than one area of modeling. Hadid has appeared on the covers of magazines like W and Vogue, smoldered for the camera in Sports Illustrated, starred in campaigns for top designers like Tom Ford, walked on the runway for Marc Jacobs and Chanel, and has a major beauty contract with Maybelline. “It’s funny because once you start to embrace what you have, it starts to be what you’re known for,” Hadid says. ‘'Coming from a place where I was confident in other things, then you can kind of use that once you’re thrown into a place where you have to have confidence in yourself to kind of get through it and take the nose and take the harsher side of the fashion industry.”
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