Magazine: You can drive 90 minutes from New York City and feel as though you’ve never left. Same restaurants, same people, same conversations, same outfits. And then you can drive 90 minutes from Manhattan and feel like you’re in a different country: dense woods, streams running alongside unpaved roads, warnings tacked to telephone poles cautioning deer hunters against trespassing. There might be a few gourmet markets and inns with minimalist, sans serif signs, but on the January day I visit Gigi Hadid in rural Pennsylvania, the only notable landmark I see anywhere near her home is a humble gas station.

It’s a modern structure, but made with reclaimed materials and wide windows that frame the landscape. The spaces inside are clean but scattered with the clutter of parenting and life in general: unopened cardboard boxes, mugs on the kitchen counter, photos of a trip to Disney World. Hadid—tall, slender, and makeup-free—is dressed in black Nike sweatpants and a pullover from her cashmere knitwear line, Guest in Residence, her hair pulled up halfway.

A blanket of snow covers the ground and icicles hang from the eaves, but inside the fire is blazing and it seems like every room has a candle lit. She has been in the area for about eight years, she tells me, ever since she bought a converted lavender farm with her mother, Yolanda, and sister, Bella, in 2017. I ask her why she moved out here in the first place—entry-grade small talk, but Hadid answers candidly: “It just kind of got to a point in my career where there started to be cameras outside every day in New York. And there was a darkness to that for me.”

The image of the Hadids in Pennsylvania is not a new one: Gigi and Bella are horse girls, transplanted from the canyons of Malibu to the pastures of Bucks County, digging in the herb garden or swatting mosquitoes on Instagram Live. As we settle on her couch, however, I sense that Gigi wants to tell the story of how she arrived here more fully. Yes, this was a place to ride out the pandemic, then a bucolic backdrop for the early days of her now four-year-old daughter Khai’s life. But the escape was also a necessity. Her fame, as one of the first “Instagram models,” came with boundary-breaking invasions of her privacy. And she is direct about the toll: “It got to a place where I would have three days off, and I would stay inside for three days. And that’s very intense.” When I speak by phone to John, her head of security for almost a decade (who prefers we only give his first name), he describes a particularly grueling set of days some years back. Her plan had been just to hide in her apartment to recover—but that wouldn’t do, John decided, and he figured out a way to get her to the beach with a friend. “The two girls were just in the ocean all day, and we drove back to the city later that evening,” John recalls. “I think things like that were able to reenergize her, to allow her to feel—I really hate to use the word normal, but sometimes her world is a little off-center, for sure.”

A stolen beach day was an aberration, though. “I felt like, even when I was just trying to put on something casual and go get coffee or go to the pharmacy, to get outside, someone had a comment: Why is she dressed like that? She looks like a slob. She looks overworked, whatever,” Hadid says. She is also blunt about the attention paid to her body: She’s too heavy or She has an eating disorder were the kinds of things she regularly heard. “I’ve been called every name in the book,” she says. “And so I phoned my mom one day and I was like, ‘Hey, I need somewhere to go.’ ” We have been together for no more than 20 minutes, but she becomes emotional, her words catching in her throat. The experience she is describing may have occurred years ago, but it is still raw and painful. “I learned the hard way,” Hadid says of the access she offered people early in her career. “There were times in the beginning where I gave too much.”

It can be a little easy to forget that we have known Gigi Hadid for so long—ever since she was a leggy teenage volleyball player, stalking through her mother’s kitchen in the background of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. (“I didn’t even really know those women,” she says now. “It was such a minute part of my life.”)

But there was a time when fame, or even a career in modeling, felt far from inevitable. It’s well-known that Hadid had her first modeling job when she was two (for Baby Guess, a connection through her mother); less well-known, perhaps, is that her mother all but forbade any further modeling work until Hadid was late into her teens so that her daughter could focus on other things: sports, school, friends, musical theater. As Hadid tells it now, when she was deciding where to go to college, she gave almost equal consideration to the idea of playing collegiate volleyball as to modeling. The summer before she enrolled at the New School in Manhattan, she spent a month in London, “doing test shoots with different photographers in creepy basements, taking long Tube rides to random go-sees,” she says. Then, in her two years as an undergraduate, she studied criminal psychology and was immediately invested in her classes. “When I was a kid, and had to stay home from school sick, I’d watch Forensic Files or the Food Network.” (Culinary school was, and actually still is, another possibility—she loves to cook.) Anything she did—and this is a theme—she wanted to do fully. “In volleyball,” says Hadid’s high school club coach, Aaron Wexler, who still coaches but also has a podcast, Within the Game, “you can hit really hard or you can tip”—a softer, more strategic move. “And Gigi told me one time—I’ll never forget—‘I’m not tipping, Coach.’ She was like, ‘I’m going for it.’ ” (Her accuracy, Wexler tells me, was less assured, but it didn’t stop her.)

In the earliest part of her career, Hadid had a young agent at IMG who she felt didn’t take her seriously, and so she worked up the courage to email the head of the agency that she wanted more than “a buddy who’s going to go to fashion parties with me.” That led her to Luiz Mattos, whom she met in the elevator of the IMG offices on her way into their meeting. The chemistry was immediate. “I was like, ‘Okay, let’s talk about our goals for the next five years,’ ” says Mattos, who has represented Hadid for more than a decade. “And she looked at me like, Oh my God, you think I can do this? I’m like, I know you can.”

Her career started to accelerate. Donatella Versace was an early champion. She was one of the first, as Hadid puts it, “to be like, ‘Your athletic volleyball body is the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen,’ even though that wasn’t really the opinion at the time in fashion.” In her, Versace saw something of the iconic supermodels she had helped launch in the ’90s: “The Supers were defined by their individuality, their personality, their strength, and the fact that they celebrated that in editorials and on the runway,” Versace says. “Gigi for me has that same spirit.”

Hadid considers it all somewhat serendipitous: She was the right girl for a vibe-shift moment, when culture was moving away from untouchable, unreachable models. And in the meantime, she was having a lot of fun, circulating in a freewheeling New York creative scene. She was then and still is good friends with the artist Austyn Weiner, whom she first met in San Francisco on a tour bus in 2013, when both girls were dating musicians. Weiner and her boyfriend at the time were hanging out, “being very rambunctious—very Almost Famous,” Weiner says. (“The epitome of a California rock-and-roll artist girlfriend,” is how Hadid describes her first impression of Weiner.) “And I think I kind of immediately became this safe space in this very new environment for her,” Weiner says.

Weiner had the idea to splatter an 18-year-old Gigi with acrylic paint and shoot her for a series she called Cover Girl. “We put her in my little Chinatown apartment shower. There was hardly any warm water. She’ll always say it’s the worst she’s ever been treated on a shoot,” Weiner jokes. “I was so young, and it was an honor to be in front of anyone’s camera,” counters Hadid, “let alone my friend and someone whose art I really loved.” The work, says Weiner, “was a stamp of a moment in time, but it also was the beginning of our relationship being centered around art.” Their friendship has since been girded by creative projects. “My world is centered around creation—and, in a completely different medium, so is hers,” says Weiner.

What does Hadid create? Editorial shoots, viral runway moments, and fashion campaigns—but she has also gently stepped out of this more prescribed lane. In 2023 she cohosted the second season of Netflix’s reality show Next in Fashion with her friend Tan France. In one episode, she judged contestants alongside Versace, and was so nervous that her hands shook, France recalls. It only lasted one episode; “She knew she nailed it,” France says. These endeavors might be just mid-20s professional excursions—albeit of a glamorous variety—or they may be the sketch of a future beyond modeling. A clue lies in the quiet, thoughtful way she launched her first real business venture without her name sewn into the labels or explicitly advertised on the items, as though she wants to test her instincts and acumen in this world without coasting (solely) on her fame. One could, in theory, wander into a Guest in Residence store and not know it has anything to do with her.

And then there’s the creative care Hadid applies to her personal life, particularly as a mother. In Pennsylvania, she tells me that she and Khai have recently been picking colors to dress in—head to toe. In her bathroom there are plastic tubs filled with toys—for their “shower parties.” A nook under a staircase has been converted into a jungle-​themed play space, complete with fake vines. “I could see Khai was interested in it,” Hadid says of the neglected crawl space, “so one week when she was at her dad’s, I said, ‘I’m going to go to Target and pimp this out.’ ”

Khai’s dad is Hadid’s ex, the singer Zayn Malik, with whom she co-parents. The two dated for about six years, and their relationship was followed with rabid interest—particularly toward its conclusion (the details of which you can look up, though it’s clear from talking to Hadid that they are very much in the past). Hadid flicks through the photos on her phone, showing me scenes of Malik holding Khai on the first day of pre-K, and describing the innate musicality Khai gets from her father. “Zayn and I do our custody schedules months in advance,” Hadid says, planning everything around the weeks they have Khai. “That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t change here and there, but we help each other out and have each other’s backs.” She and Malik have entered this new phase of their partnership with “love, and a feeling of camaraderie,” she says, accepting—more or less—that their relationship will likely forever be under some kind of microscope. “There is the hard part of the world knowing this much, and thinking they know everything,” says Hadid. “And at the end of the day, we’re not interested in giving everyone our whole story. What we are interested in is raising our daughter together, with so much respect for each other, and not just as co-­parents, but what we’ve been through together.”

Being a mother “has only made her more of herself,” says Weiner. “Gigi doesn’t want to be in a club in the city on a Tuesday night.” Hadid tours me through the craft room, a long, glass-sided space that overlooks the pool, where pom-poms and ice-pop sticks and googly eyes are arranged in glass canisters like gumballs at a candy store. Khai is able to paint on one of the walls in the room; it seems to have had the effect of preventing a mess elsewhere, Hadid tells me, though this is a house where it feels like a mess might sometimes be encouraged.

“It’s a beautiful thing she’s done—​created a space out here where she can give Khai the most normal experience possible,” says Adrienne Tosti, who describes herself as “Gigi’s five-two, stay-at-​home-​mom friend,” and Hadid describes, simply, as one of her best friends. Tosti moved to Pennsylvania with her husband when she was pregnant, and met Hadid at a local mommy-​and-​me class: “My daughter was in an Elsa nightgown princess dress,” says Tosti, “and Khai was also in something Elsa related, and they looked at each other and were like, Okay, we’re on the same page.” She and Hadid spend a large portion of their parenting hours together, it seems, parked at the pool in the summer, going to the trampoline park, taking their daughters into the city to visit the Natural History Museum. “We get the schedule, and we’re like, Okay, so what are we going to do Monday?” says Tosti.

Hadid describes hers as a kind of double life, a way she has of inhabiting distinct identities from day to day. “I joke with my mom friends that I feel like the Hannah Montana of fashion,” she says. “If you just met me at a photo shoot, you wouldn’t see a full depiction of me. I feel that as a model, I’m a performer. And I don’t think that seeing me walk into random places around here,” she gestures at the landscape, “screams supermodel.”

As much as motherhood has given Hadid a life away from modeling, it has also helped her chart a path through fame. Because she splits her time between Pennsylvania and New York, it’s no longer really worth the paparazzi’s time to camp out at her Manhattan apartment. At the same time, she has developed a remarkable degree of equanimity about her own exposure—​“This is part of the job; when you’re a public figure, it comes with the territory,” she says.

When it comes to Khai, though, she is firm. After her daughter was born, Hadid wrote an open letter to the paparazzi—a moderate plea that requested they obscure Khai’s face. “We didn’t grow up walking out of our house thinking, What angle could someone be watching me from?” Hadid says. “And that’s not something I want to be part of her train of thought.” The letter did not, of course, change everything. If she notices a photographer while they are in the park, she bundles Khai into the stroller, pulls down the sun shade, and makes a game of it: Let’s see how quickly we can get home! But post-​letter, there are a handful of photographers who, when they see Hadid with Khai, put down their cameras.

How much of her daughter to share on her own social media is an internal negotiation. “I don’t think it would be fully genuine to post nothing of Khai,” she says, “but I also don’t want to put anything up that would take away from her privacy and her peace.” I ask her if she’s ever tempted to give up on social media entirely, but it is clearly not in her nature. “I’ll go to Paris, and there’s people in front of shows that have been fans of mine for 10 years. And I love that. I love connecting with people.… I am grateful for social media, and the ways that it has connected me to the world. I wouldn’t have the same career without it.” The pressures and anxieties and benefits of social media are clearly matters she’s thought a lot about, and she even texts me later to elaborate: “My Instagram is like snail mail,” she says, “if you follow me, you have to be patient, life has to load.… It’s different from how socials felt when I was younger. It doesn’t come as naturally to me as it did when Instagram started.”

Hadid credits therapy and just getting older with helping her balance the people-pleasing, hard-working parts of her personality with the desire to “have respect for myself.” She now finds it easier to say no, and even finds power in asserting the reason: “I have no regrets, ever, being like, ‘I can’t make that job. I have Khai that week.’ That’s just the boundary I’ve set.” Again, Hadid comes to the brink of tears as she describes the life she has built for her daughter in this quiet enclave—the secret jungles and painted playhouses, but, more importantly, the community. “Khai is protected by our friendships here. And that means,” she pauses, visibly emotional, “that means a lot to me.”

Hadid drives me to a deli to pick up sandwiches for lunch, speeding along the icy roads with confidence, chatting about the inauguration (she watched—and thinks it’s important not to stick your head in the sand, no matter your politics), exercise (she’s an athlete still, has been text­ing Coach Wexler, and has even gone so far as to investigate adult volleyball leagues in the area), and the Broadway shows she’s attended lately (“Sweeney Todd—incredible—for two weeks, I was marching around the streets of New York to ‘The Ballad of Sweeney Todd’ ”). Wicked—which she has seen 10 times—is her favorite musical. A humble suggestion for Jon Chu: Cast her in one of the sequels. “I don’t just want to go act in TV and movies as, like, the boring girlfriend,” Hadid says. Would she try theater? “It’s like a dream,” she almost whispers, “that’s scary to say to you.”

“Bradley”—that would be Bradley Cooper, her boyfriend of more than a year—“has opened me up to going to the theater more, and that’s something that’s so nice to bring back into my life.” She and Cooper met at a backyard birthday party for the child of a mutual friend, which seems, somewhat ironically given its quotidian dimensions, the best place to meet if you are two world-famous celebrities trying to date. “You want to give yourself a normal experience of dating,” Hadid says, “and even for my friends who aren’t public figures, that’s hard. Where do you go? And, what? You just start talking to people? And then there’s another added layer of privacy and security. You want to believe that people are going to have your back and not call TMZ or go on Deuxmoi or whatever, but you just don’t know.”

Whatever strange dance dating as a supermodel might require, she describes her relationship now as “very romantic and happy,” though there are parts of it she wants to keep to herself, not because there is anything especially secretive about it, but because “it’s just not part of our relationship to share for whatever reason.” She’s aware that people—those unnamed “sources” upon which an entire ecosystem of clickbait headlines rests—will provide information “that’s kind of right and kind of wrong,” she says. But “you just have to let it go; you can’t always correct everything.”

What she does tell me about this relationship makes it seem like it might not have taken place at an earlier stage in her life. “I think just getting to the point where knowing what you want and deserve in a relationship is essential,” she says, “and then to find someone that is in a place in their life where they know what they want and deserve…and you both do work separately to come together and be the best partner that you can be. I just feel really lucky. Yeah, lucky’s the word.

“I respect him so much as a creative,” she continues, “and I feel that he gives so much to me: encouragement and, just, belief. For those people you admire to encourage you, it can create so much belief in yourself. Like, what’s the worst thing if I auditioned for this? You jump and take the leap.”

The next day, eight flights up, in a bright, whitewashed studio on the West Side of Manhattan, Gigi Hadid is not quite leaping, but radiating some of the energy of the musical ​theater kid she once was, performing for the camera. “I have always been impressed by Gigi,” says Miuccia Prada, another one of her early champions. “She is incredibly professional and charming at the same time, always in a good mood and gentle. She holds a special place not only in the world of fashion and has done so for a long time. It is the result of the hard work and the commitment she puts into all she does.”

Hadid is shooting the spring-​summer looks for Guest in Residence; the new collection will launch just 10 days later. The studio is littered with props: water guns, Hula-Hoops, foam pool noodles, flip-flops, New Balance sneakers with the laces untied. The theme of the shoot is “postcard from nowhere,” or, perhaps more aptly, anywhere the sun shines. Today, it is 20-something degrees outside, but a pool day in the studio.

Hadid has layered her own narrative onto the concept. “He’s coming back soon,” she croons in falsetto, draping herself over a giant beach ball. She is a mid-century astronaut’s wife, gazing up at Sputnik and nursing a martini. It’s a little bit plastic, a little bit Stepford. One gets the sense that the other models in the shoot, game as they are, haven’t quite caught the high-speed train of her narrative, even though she’s sweetly explaining it to them. Initially, the idea had been for her hair to be quite natural, she tells me, but she had her stylist, Dimitris Giannetos, shellac it into a Mary Tyler Moore–style flipped-up bob, a smile of a hairdo. “I’m thinking about the cupcakes,” Hadid belts out more than once while the shutter snaps. “Does everyone know that I brought cupcakes?”

Guest in Residence employees, from the summer intern turned marketing coordinator to the e-commerce manager, filter in. Apart from the core people involved in the shoot—Rossella Raffi, the chief marketing officer; Hadid’s business partner Isaac Ross; the art director Paolo Santosuosso—it doesn’t feel like the staff needs to be there, but they settle comfortably along the sidelines nonetheless. With Hadid, says Guest in Residence design director Sijeo Kim, “it’s not like, Okay, I have all the authority, so you do this,” she tells me. “It’s more like, We’re in this together. Let’s talk about the idea.” Kim describes meeting Hadid for the first time at her apartment; she was carefully dressed in supporting-​staff black, while Gigi was in a leather jacket with a power shoulder—both of them now aware that they were trying out roles.

Hadid sits down next to us as Kim tells the story; it’s lunchtime and a plate of Middle Eastern food is balanced on her knees. “A power shoulder—very unlike me!” she exclaims. Kim’s voice was shaking during that first meeting as she showed Hadid samples of her earlier design work, “and then Gigi was like, ‘It’s okay, my voice shakes all the time too.’ ” Their relationship, like many of the initially professional relationships Hadid enters, has become personal. They have a long-running WhatsApp thread, where they send inspiration back and forth—everything from Korean architecture to a T-shirt that has been a stalwart of Hadid’s closet.

Raffi, who traveled extensively with Hadid while they were promoting a collection she did with Tommy Hilfiger at the start of her career, describes a memorable trip to Tokyo, where they were besieged by crowds of fans, including a giant Gigi doll that followed them around the city. In the midst of it all, Hadid managed to organize a birthday dinner for Raffi. “It was an indication of who she is. She really pays attention, and she cherishes the team around her,” says Raffi. “That makes you feel motivated. And it’s also very rare.” When the Guest in Residence staff has to stay late at their office, interfering with the cleaning crew’s schedule, Hadid always makes a point to thank them, Raffi says. Hadid is conscious, though, that she can’t build a company purely through cupcakes and birthday dinners: “Sometimes I have to say the thing that’s hard to say and be the boss,” Hadid tells me.

When the shoot is over, Hadid quickly changes into cashmere Guest in Residence sweats. “I’m not a big shopper,” she admits. “My wardrobe is really the basics that I’ve been reworking.” This was part of the motivation for Guest in Residence, she says. She wanted to sell things that will last and have less of an impact on the earth than most fashion. (She can geek out on cashmere quality and supply chains and how they are reseeding the fields where the cashmere goats graze.) She is both leader and student when it comes to Guest in Residence: One of her favorite things to do, when she has the time, is to stop by the store and investigate how people are approaching the clothes. “I’ll start asking people their size, if I can help them, and they just get so confused,” she says. “They look at me like, Does she work here all the time?”

We are blocks from the Shed, the exhibition space currently housing “Luna Luna,” a show of long-​neglected amusement park rides designed by 20th century art icons like Keith Haring and Roy Lichtenstein, and I want her to visit the show. (She won’t have time, of course. Her schedule, as I know, has been blocked months in advance.) Her love of theme parks is well documented, originating, she tells me, in trips to the fantastical Efteling in Holland with her Dutch mother when she was a child. “It really opened my mind—not just about theme parks and rides, but some of my first memories of really looking around.” Working with Karl Lagerfeld, in particular, she says, brought this back: “Walking onto those Chanel sets—I felt like a kid in an amusement park. It rang those same bells in my brain.” When she texts later, she elaborates a bit more. Her work on Guest in Residence is striving to re-create this: “Our conversation made me think of how putting myself in creative situations makes me feel like a kid again,” she writes.

In a few months, Hadid will turn 30—certainly no longer a kid—and I ask her if she feels like a new chapter is beginning. (And for those who will be watching the slow roll of her social media feed: Yes, there will be a party, and she is thinking that she wants it to be formal, maybe with a theme, “something a little bit camp.”) “I’m excited for 30,” she says. “I feel like a lot of the stuff in my career, in my relationships, in my life, in my friendships, that people maybe normally go through in their 30s, I went through in my 20s.” Her goal for the upcoming year is to do more of the things that scare her, that maybe make her hands shake just a bit. “After 10 years of doing this job, I’m not nervous anymore. I have to remember that if I feel scared or intimidated, that means I’m excited. And yeah, at this point, why not try?”

I ask if it ever felt like things were moving a bit too fast for her—in her career, but also in becoming a mom. “For a lot of moms there’s this perfect image of what they’re supposed to be and how it needs to go,” she says, but for her and Khai, they are learning every day. “We grow together. You wake up and do your best and you realize it is enough, and there’s a beauty in not necessarily knowing exactly how that’s going to go.” She pauses a moment, as though aware that this same sentiment could be applied to various inflection points in her career, relationships, parenting—life in general. “I think that’s a huge lesson that I needed. And probably one of the reasons that Khai came to me. You can’t always be in control. You can’t always plan. You can look at an experience as the right or wrong time for anything, if that’s your perspective. Now I just give myself the grace and look at how many things I’ve handled. Step by step, I learned. I got through it.”

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In this story: hair, Orlando Pita; makeup, Francelle Daly; manicurist, Jin Soon Choi; tailors: Hailey Desjardins and Luis Cascante. Produced by AL Studio. Set Design: Mary Howard.

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E.E. Cummings