Gigi Hadid's modeling career is older than her memory. She was two years old when Guess co-founder Paul Marciano put her in Baby Guess ads — then her mother pulled her out so she could have a childhood, and the industry had to wait fifteen years to get her back. When it did, it got one of the defining faces of the 2010s: a Los Angeles volleyball captain who became, by the British Fashion Council's verdict, International Model of the Year, with more than fifty international Vogue appearances and a place among the industry's "New Supers."
From Baby Guess to the New Supers
Jelena Noura Hadid was born on April 23, 1995, in Los Angeles — "Gigi" was her mother Yolanda's own childhood nickname, recycled at school to avoid confusion with a classmate named Helena. The bloodline was almost suspiciously on-brand: a Dutch former-model mother and real-estate developer father, Mohamed Hadid, with younger siblings Bella and Anwar both headed for the same business. Raised on a Santa Barbara ranch before the family moved to Beverly Hills, she captained the varsity volleyball team at Malibu High and competed on horseback, then moved to New York to study criminal psychology at The New School — a degree she suspended when the other career stopped leaving room for it.
The adult run began when she signed with IMG Models in 2013 and walked her first New York Fashion Week for Desigual in February 2014, the same month Carine Roitfeld put her on the cover of CR Fashion Book. The next two years compressed a decade of career: Tom Ford eyewear and beauty campaigns, the 2015 Pirelli Calendar, Maybelline's global ambassadorship, Marc Jacobs, Chanel and Jean Paul Gaultier on the runway, a scene-stealing turn in Taylor Swift's "Bad Blood" video, and a December 2015 debut at the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show.
The Tommy Years
2016 was the year the industry stopped calling her a rising star. She became Tommy Hilfiger's global ambassador in January and by autumn had co-designed Gigi by Tommy Hilfiger, a capsule collection that ran for four seasons and won her the Daily Front Row award for Best Design Debut. During the Fall 2016 fashion month she opened five shows and closed seven across New York, Milan and Paris. In October, Stuart Weitzman released a boot named after her — the Gigi Boot. In December she earned her Victoria's Secret wings and accepted the British Fashion Council's International Model of the Year award from Donatella Versace's hands.
March 2017 made the scale of it visible: four Vogue covers in a single month — American, British, Chinese and the inaugural Vogue Arabia. That year she also stepped behind the camera, shooting the Versus Versace campaign herself. Forbes had her among the world's highest-paid models from 2017 onward, with earnings reported at $20 million a year at the peak.
The Work Beyond the Runway
The campaign résumé reads like a luxury mall directory: Versace, Fendi, Moschino, Valentino, Balmain, Max Mara, DSQUARED2, Topshop, BMW's M2 launch, plus design collaborations with Vogue Eyewear, Messika Jewelry and Reebok — first as the face of the #PerfectNever campaign, then as a sneaker designer in her own right. Guess, where it all began, has used her in three campaigns as an adult. The latest chapter skews global-ambassador: Rabanne made her the face of its Million Gold For Her fragrance in 2024, and Brazilian footwear giant Havaianas signed her as global ambassador in 2025.
Television became a second lane rather than a stunt. She hosted the 2016 American Music Awards, competed against Bobby Flay on Food Network with chef Anne Burrell in her corner, guest-starred in a Scooby-Doo episode, and in 2023 co-hosted Netflix's fashion-design competition Next In Fashion alongside Tan France — a job that traded on something the runway rarely shows: she is genuinely funny on camera.
Guest in Residence
In September 2022 Hadid launched Guest in Residence, a knitwear and cashmere label where she is founder and creative director, not a celebrity name on a license. She has kept it deliberately small and direct-to-consumer, expanding through collaborations like the 2025 limited women's collection with Los Angeles brand Madhappy. It is the clearest sign of how she plans to outlast the catwalk phase of her career.
Earnings and Net Worth
Forbes placed her among the world's highest-paid models every year from 2017, with the $20 million peak in that first year. Wealth trackers such as Celebrity Net Worth currently estimate her fortune at around $30 million, with a typical year bringing in $9–10 million across Maybelline, Tommy Hilfiger, Versace and her ambassador contracts — before counting Guest in Residence. As with all such figures, these are editorial estimates rather than audited numbers.
Off the Runway
Hadid has been public about living with Hashimoto's thyroiditis since 2014, and about managing social anxiety with therapy — a frankness that predates the industry's mental-health turn. Her activism is long-running: a UNICEF mission to Rohingya refugee programs in Bangladesh in 2018, a $1 million donation to Palestinian relief agencies made jointly with her sister Bella, and a 2022 pledge to donate her fashion-month earnings to Ukrainian war victims and Palestinians alike. When a self-styled "prankster" grabbed her off the ground outside a Milan show in 2016, she elbowed her way free — and turned the viral moment into a bluntly practical case for women's self-defense. In November 2022 she deleted her Twitter account, calling the platform "a cesspool of hate & bigotry."
The Private Side
Her romantic history reads like a 2010s pop chart. There was an on-again, off-again run with Australian singer Cody Simpson (she starred in two of his videos), a few months with Joe Jonas in 2015 — she co-directed DNCE's "Cake by the Ocean" video — and then the defining one: Zayn Malik, from late 2015 through several breakups and reconciliations. Their daughter Khai was born in September 2020; the relationship ended for good in late 2021, and the two have co-parented since, splitting time around the family farms in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Since 2023 she has been with actor Bradley Cooper — and by mid-2026 the tabloid press was reporting an engagement and even wedding planning, though neither of them has confirmed anything publicly. After a decade of conducting romances in paparazzi light, she keeps this one deliberately quiet.
Where She Is Now
Hadid lives between New York and the family farm in New Hope, Pennsylvania, where she is raising her daughter Khai, born in September 2020; she co-parents with her former partner, singer Zayn Malik. Professionally she remains an IMG model with active Maybelline and Havaianas contracts, a working creative director at Guest in Residence, and — alongside Kendall Jenner and her sister Bella — one of the few faces of the Instagirl era still setting the industry's terms rather than taking them.