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20 Things You Didn’t Know About Gigi Hadid

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Long before Gigi Hadid was walking for Chanel and Versace, she was riding horses and playing volleyball in Malibu.

Gigi Hadid’s rise from Baby Guess campaigns to Victoria’s Secret runway status looks effortless from the outside, but the path ran through a Junior Olympic qualifying arena, a high school volleyball court and a New School lecture hall before it ever hit a Maybelline billboard. Born Jelena Noura Hadid on April 23, 1995, she grew up in a household already fluent in cameras and modeling contracts. The video “20 Things You Didn’t Know About Gigi Hadid” pulls back the curtain on how a childhood nickname turned into one of the biggest names in fashion.

• Gigi was discovered by Guess co-founder Paul Marciano at age two and modeled for Baby Guess before her mother, Yolanda Hadid, pulled her out of the industry to let her have a normal childhood.
• She was a nationally ranked equestrian who competed in Junior Olympic qualifiers and captained the varsity volleyball team at Malibu High School before signing with IMG Models in 2011.
• She enrolled at The New School in New York to study criminal psychology after graduating high school in 2013, pausing coursework once her modeling schedule took off.

A Family Business Long Before Fame

Gigi’s mother, Yolanda Hadid, was a Dutch former model who later became a fixture on “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.” Her father, Mohamed Hadid, is a Palestinian real-estate developer known for building high-profile properties around Los Angeles. “Gigi” started as a family nickname Yolanda used for her daughter, and it stuck so completely that most fans have no idea her legal name is Jelena Noura Hadid. She has two younger siblings who followed her into modeling, Bella and Anwar, plus older half-sisters from her father’s side.

Marciano’s discovery of a two-year-old Gigi for Baby Guess is the kind of origin story that sounds manufactured until you check the timeline — it’s real, and it’s the reason Guess campaigns have tracked her entire life. Yolanda’s decision to shut down the modeling work during Gigi’s childhood is arguably the more interesting call, since it meant Gigi came back to Guess as a teenager on her own terms rather than as a industry lifer with no other identity.

The Athlete Before The Model

Before agencies were calling, Gigi Hadid was training. She competed as a nationally ranked equestrian, chasing Junior Olympic qualifying rounds on horseback, and she captained the varsity volleyball team at Malibu High School. That competitive streak followed her to New York, where she took up boxing at Gotham Gym to stay in shape between castings and campaign shoots — a far more physically demanding routine than the “stands and poses” image most people have of runway work.

She signed with IMG Models in 2011, but the résumé that got her there started with equestrian ribbons and a high school volleyball roster, not a portfolio.

Criminal Psychology, MasterChef And A Kitchen Nobody Expected

After graduating high school in 2013, Hadid moved to New York City and enrolled at The New School to study criminal psychology, a detail that surprises people who only know her from campaign ads. She paused those studies once modeling work became a full-time job, but the intellectual streak shows up elsewhere — she’s an avid cook and baker who beat out a field of celebrities to win an episode of Fox’s “MasterChef Celebrity Showdown” in early 2016. It’s the kind of credential that doesn’t fit neatly into a runway bio, which is exactly why it’s on this list.

The Campaigns, The Videos And The Runway

By 2016, Hadid’s client list read like a fashion trade publication’s wish list: Maybelline, Guess and Stuart Weitzman all put her front and center in major campaigns. She walked in the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show in 2015, appeared in Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” video and turned up again in Zayn Malik’s “Pillowtalk.” That kind of crossover between runway, retail campaigns and pop-culture cameos is part of what separates a working model from a household name, and it’s a jump that plenty of aspiring models never make — for context on how differently that path can play out, see how winners of America’s Next Top Model have fared trying to build the same kind of career.

With a younger sister, Bella, and brother, Anwar, both modeling in her wake, Hadid has also become something of a blueprint for how a well-connected teenager breaks into the business — a question that comes up any time a famous family’s kid starts booking shoots, including chatter about whether Shiloh Jolie-Pitt might follow a similar route.

The clearest sign of how far she’d climbed by September 2016: during New York Fashion Week that month, Hadid launched a collaborative capsule collection with Tommy Hilfiger, putting her name directly on the label rather than just wearing it. That’s the project to watch as fall 2016 shows roll out — not another campaign face, but her own line on the racks.