On the heels of Rebecca Romijn’s controversial comments about social media stars turning into supermodels, Gigi Hadid scored her first American Vogue cover and admitted during a chat with the magazine’s August issue podcast that, yes, Instagram did help launch her career.
“It’s a way that people get to know us other than a face on a page,” Hadid said during the chat with André Leon Talley. “We are given the opportunity to spread our wings in so many different industries because people get to know us; they start to understand different levels of our personalities and our talents.”
In case you missed it, Romijn criticized models such as Hadid and Kendall Jenner during an interview with Entertainment Tonight this past April. “I know a lot of people — legitimate fashion people — can’t stand it,” Romijn said while talking about models gaining momentum through social media. “Hate it that these, you know, social media stars are now the supermodels in fashion. They are not true supermodels.” Romijn later clarified to Us Weekly that she didn’t mean to bash the besties and that she was “asked my opinion about a social media trend,” not about Hadid and Jenner specifically.
Her comments touched a nerve, though, and launched a supermodel war between the two generations.
“Obviously, Cindy [Crawford] and Claudia [Schiffer] and Naomi [Campbell] — no one can do it better than them in the time that they were in,” Hadid told Talley, before adding: “I think that the reason why Kendall and Cara [Delevingne] and Karlie [Kloss] and I are kind of … able to have this moment right now is because the industry needed a change to be able to welcome in another generation.”
And although social media helped launch her career, Hadid has faced her fair share of online trolls criticizing her for looking both “fat” and “anorexic,” she said.
“Everyone is affected by the pressures that come from being on social media, and we’re all human,” she concluded. “I’ll never say that it doesn’t affect me.”
