A power couple celebrates their Muslim roots
I met Gigi Hadid a few years back. It was before she was GIGI HADID, capital letters, italicized.
It was certainly before she was #Gigi, as she was matter-of-fact lauded on the cover of Elle Canada in the last year, and before she’d become, to my mind, an unwitting multiculti pioneer.
The winds of fame being what they are, Hadid — harnessed by hashtags, buoyed by a sparkly six degrees — has emerged as one of the planet’s biggest models. Then she was known peripherally at best, as part of the Greek Chorus on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, courtesy of her mother, Yolanda Foster. Now, with no less than 10 international Vogue covers under her belt in the last year alone (including Spain, Italy, China and Brazil), and a fashion spoke that wheels between the commercial (Sports Illustrated, Victoria’s Secret) and the haute (Tom Ford has anointed her), the 21-year-old is also on the cusp of releasing her own capsule collection with Tommy Hilfiger called — what else? — Gigi by Tommy Hilfiger.
To wit, last year she was a mere “presenter” at the MMVAs here in Toronto. Last month, at the annual affair, she swooped into the city to “host” the thing, during which she made six impressive ensemble changes.
“A swift ascendancy,” is how the fashion site Fashionista.com frames the path of the girl with the enigmatic half-smile, a heart-shaped face that recalls a young Portia de Rossi, aquamarine eyes and hair that looks like she’s just jetted in from Tulum.
Wild as this may be, it pales in comparison to Gigi’s greatest coup of all: at a time when Donald Trump, the U.S. Republican party’s presumptive candidate for president, is stoking anxiety in that country about Muslims, there is, in Gigi and her singer boyfriend Zayn Malik, an actual US Weekly-worthy celebrity couple with the last names Hadid and Malik.
See, Gigi’s ancestry is half-Dutch and half-Palestinian (owing to her Muslim dad, Mohamed Hadid), while Zayn’s mother is English and father is British-Pakistani. And while the extent to which these two stars identify as Muslims remains uncertain, it’s also true that they haven’t shunned their histories either: at the start of Islam’s holy month of Ramadan recently, Gigi tweeted out a simple greeting, Ramadan Mubarak, to the world, while just this week, to mark its end, Zayn tweeted, “Love and peace on this beautiful day. Eid Mubarak to everyone celebrating.”
The extent to which this all hasn’t been headline news is perhaps news in itself: Gigi and Zayn’s casual interaction with the faith brings to mind the manner in which the name of Jewish designer Ralph Lauren (born Ralph Lifschitz) has grown synonymous the world over with WASP-dom. And consider the Kennedys, who were gatekeepers of 1960s WASP life even though they were Catholic.
All of which is to say, culture zigs and zags. It is not static nor homogenous. And when Hadid and Malik posed together in a not-unmodest spread in American Vogue some months back, it was a zeitgeist-worthy moment — one happening just as Trump was fanning flames about a “Muslim ban.”
Islam and the world of celebrity have intersected previously, sure, chiefly when the boxer born Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali. It resulted in a cultural earthquake in America, if there ever was one. The roster of famous American Muslims has since grown to include author and TV star Mehmet Oz, better known as Dr. Oz, and basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
But Gigi and Zayn? As far as viral power couples go, it rates as a first.
A defining image of their relationship? In late June, Hadid was spotted out and about wearing a designer bomber jacket with her boyfriend’s name scribbled on the back. It was written in Arabic.