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Gigi Hadid Says Her "Volleyball Body" Made It Hard to Break into Runway Modeling
Yolanda Hadid's supermodel daughter shared, "People were hard on me and tried to say that I didn’t have a runway body."
Longtime fans of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills have followed along with Gigi Hadid from the very beginning of her modeling career, way before she landed a bazillion Vogue covers and luxury ad campaigns. Now Yolanda Hadid's oldest daughter is a supermodel and fashion icon, and to make it official, she just nabbed a cover story for I-D magazine's "The Icons and Idols Issue."
In the article, Gigi said that it hasn't always been easy for her in the fashion industry. Designer Jean Paul Gaultier helped open the door for her when he first cast her in Paris. "At the time I was still starting out in my career, I was coming out of high school, I still had my volleyball body," Gigi told I-D. "It was a body that I loved. I knew how hard I worked to have those muscles, to be curved in those places – I kind of miss it now. At the time, people were hard on me and tried to say that I didn’t have a runway body."
This casting gave her a huge boost of confidence. "For Jean Paul to have me at his last ready-to-wear show in 2015 – not only to have me, but also to put me in an outfit that didn’t cover a lot… like, there were still stylists or designers at that time who were putting me in their shows, but putting me something that really covered my body," she said. "And so for him to make me feel like he wanted me to shine in that way, it really meant a lot to me as a young model. And I know that he has done that for a lot of people."
Here's Gigi back in 2015 at Jean Paul Gaultier's last ready-to-wear show.
And here she is in January 2020 at Gaultier's final couture show, the same show that Project Runway host Karlie Kloss also walked in. "I was so honored to be asked to walk in it," Gigi told I-D.
Gigi's love of volleyball was a topic of discussion on RHOBH: In Season 3, momager Yolanda told her daughter that "volleyball is a very masculine sport, modeling is a very feminine thing."
In an interview, Yolanda also brought up volleyball, saying: "Gigi wanted to model all this time, and now she's like 'I want to go back to play volleyball.' She's got to start building her career and that means sometimes we have to give up things we like to do. These girls, they train four hours a day after school, so their bodies are big and bulky. They eat like men. I wanted her to develop as a woman."
