Supermodel Gigi Hadid broke down in tears over the pressures of fame in a recent interview with Elle Magazine.
After Elle editor Adrienne Gaffney asked Hadid to tell her what her fans wouldn’t know about her from the headlines or social media posts, the supermodel’s eye welled up with tears, Gaffney noted.
“What does the world not know about me? I don’t know. I’m getting emotional [thinking about it],” Hadid finally said, after pausing.
“I think that I’m someone who you have to be in front of to experience,” the model added. “It’s not hard. This isn’t a complaint. It’s more that in my job, you see a lot of snapshots.”
Hadid then wiped her tears, which moved Gaffney to apologize for asking a question that made her cry.
“No, it’s fine. Apparently, I needed to say it,” she said. “There are a lot of snapshots and really quick moments where, again, there’s not a lot of context given.”
“I’ve had early experiences where you learn how the world reacts when you share things in certain ways,” the supermodel said.
“Sometimes you just leave something feeling like you were taken out of context,” she added. “Or just feel like you revealed too much, and it was taken advantage of. Whatever those learning-the-hard-way experiences are, you grow a certain skin.”
Hadid, who has 76.8 million followers on Instagram, added that she believes being cast in the series Next in Fashion will be her chance to open up to her fans in a gradual way as well as show more of herself than what people assume from paparazzi photos.
When Hadid is not posting to social media or trying to make her fans understand her by appearing in a reality television series, she is nonetheless giving the world a clearer understanding of who she is.
In November, the model deleted her Twitter account after Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s acquisition of the social media platform, claiming it had become a “cesspool of hate.”
Last year, Hadid was accused of “co-opting a global tragedy in order to spread lies about Israel” after she compared the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In 2017, Hadid and her sister Bella took to the streets of New York City, where they joined protests against then-President Donald Trump.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.