Gigi Hadid and the 90s Supermodel Era: A Timeless Connection

The connection between Gigi Hadid and the 90s supermodel era is more literal than the comparison usually makes it sound. Yolanda van den Herik, the woman the world knows as Yolanda Hadid from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, was a working Ford Models contracted face in Paris and New York through most of the 1980s and into the early 1990s, signed by Eileen Ford herself at sixteen and walking shows for Versace, Yves Saint Laurent and Calvin Klein alongside the same names who later became the cohort: Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, Stephanie Seymour. By the time Yolanda's eldest daughter Jelena Noura Hadid was born in April 1995, the era her mother had worked inside was already being filed away by the press, and the casting directors and photographers who had built it were moving into the editorial-and-campaign roles they would hold for the next thirty years.

That second part matters more than it is usually given credit for. The 90s supermodel era did not end so much as turn over to a generation of directors and editors who simply kept working. Pat McGrath, Steven Meisel, Anna Wintour, Edward Enninful, Carine Roitfeld, Mario Testino: the names that built the Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford eras were also the names who would later cast and shoot Gigi Hadid. The continuity is unusual, and a fair amount of the structural overlap between the two eras is really an overlap of personnel.

The Ford Models lineage that started it

Yolanda was scouted in the Netherlands in 1980, signed to Ford in New York shortly afterwards, and worked the New York–Paris–Milan circuit until the early 1990s, when she married Mohamed Hadid and effectively retired into the family life that produced first the Hadid children and then her later television career. She was never a top-tier name, although she did appear in Vogue Paris and Elle Italia during the years when those magazines were producing the editorial vocabulary that ran fashion until the digital migration. What she came home with, more importantly, was a working understanding of how the industry was run from the inside: which agency board placed which faces, how a casting director made a decision, how a contract had to be read.

That knowledge ran the early Hadid careers. When Gigi signed with IMG Models in November 2013, the agency choice was not a coin flip; it was a strategic placement on the development board run by Ivan Bart, with internal positioning aimed at the editorial cycle rather than the catalog one. Bella followed her sister into the same board two years later. The decisions that other model families made for the first time, the Hadid family had inherited from Yolanda's career.

For the full Gigi version of that career arc, our Gigi Hadid fashion career reads the working trajectory show by show.

The cover count, adjusted for the era

The 90s supermodel era was defined, more than by any single image, by the volume of magazine covers a top-tier face could carry. Linda Evangelista has talked publicly about working seven days a week through 1989 and 1990 and ending those years with hundreds of covers between the international Vogues, Harper's Bazaar, Elle and Marie Claire in eleven languages each. Cindy Crawford crossed a thousand covers across the same decade. Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington ran similar volumes, with Naomi in particular pushing past the editorial gatekeeping that had kept Black models off mainstream Vogues for the previous three decades.

Gigi's number is somewhere north of forty Vogue covers, with the November 2015 American Vogue debut as the first and the international editions, Vogue Paris, Vogue Italia, Vogue Japan, Vogue Korea, British Vogue, Vogue Spain, Vogue Mexico, Vogue Brazil, Vogue Arabia, accounting for most of the rest. Adjusted for the post-print collapse, which has roughly halved the number of major monthly Vogues that publish print issues in any given year, that volume sits at almost exactly the equivalent of a Linda Evangelista peak run. The Harper's Bazaar, Elle, W, V, Numéro, Self Service and AnOther covers fill in the rest of the editorial archive.

The cover-volume question is a useful one because it shows the continuity at the level the magazines themselves use. Anna Wintour ran American Vogue in 1988; she ran American Vogue in 2015. Franca Sozzani ran Vogue Italia from 1988 until her death in 2016, which means the September 2014 Vogue Italia cover of Gigi was commissioned by the same editor who had run the entire Linda-and-Christy era from the same office. That kind of editorial continuity is not in any other industry.

The runway tenure looks the same, at the same age

A second working comparison is the runway pace at the equivalent career-tenure point. Naomi Campbell walked sixty-plus shows a season at her 1991-to-1995 peak. Linda Evangelista did similar volume from 1989 to 1994. Christy Turlington and Cindy Crawford ran parallel cycles. Spring and Fall together would produce roughly 100 to 130 runway appearances a year for a top-tier face.

Gigi walked her first Fashion Week season in February 2014 for Desigual in New York. By her Spring 2015 cycle the count was already in the high forties between New York, Milan and Paris. The Spring 2016 cycle pushed past sixty, with appearances for Tom Ford, Marc Jacobs, Diane von Furstenberg, Anna Sui, Tommy Hilfiger, Versace, Bottega Veneta, Fendi, Roberto Cavalli, Chanel, Saint Laurent, Balmain, Isabel Marant and Miu Miu in the same season. By the Spring 2017 cycle she had walked Versace, Atelier Versace, Fendi, Prada, Bottega Veneta, Chanel and Saint Laurent across the same fashion month.

Where the comparison breaks down, slightly, is at the editorial pinnacle. The 90s cohort booked Steven Meisel's Vogue Italia covers and Bruce Weber's Calvin Klein campaigns as a matter of routine; the contemporary Gigi-era editorial archive includes Meisel-shot covers (the 2015 American Vogue September issue) but runs a slightly more fragmented set of photographers, partly because the contemporary editorial market itself is more fragmented. The volume is comparable; the concentration is not.

The casting continuity is the part you can see

Pat McGrath has been the makeup director on a striking proportion of the editorial work in both eras. She cast Linda Evangelista in the early-90s Meisel work; she has cast Gigi and Bella through most of the 2014-to-2024 cycle. Her own brand, Pat McGrath Labs, runs alongside the casting work, and the casting decisions she makes for a Versace show in Milan are not very different in approach from the ones she was making for Versace shows in Milan in 1993.

Steven Meisel is the other obvious continuity. He shot Linda Evangelista for Vogue Italia for almost twenty years; he shot Gigi for the American Vogue September 2015 issue, and again for a Vogue Italia cover in 2018. The image vocabulary is recognisably the same, partly because Meisel's image vocabulary is recognisably his own.

Anna Wintour is the institutional version of the same continuity. She has run American Vogue since 1988, and her cover choices through both eras have organised what the wider press has been willing to call a supermodel. Edward Enninful, who started at i-D magazine at eighteen in 1990 and ran British Vogue from 2017 to 2024, is the equivalent figure on the British side. Carine Roitfeld at Vogue Paris from 2001 to 2011, and then through her own CR Fashion Book since 2012, runs a third strand of the same editorial conversation.

A model who shoots a Vogue Italia cover in 2015 is, in a real institutional sense, working with the same editorial architecture Linda Evangelista shot a Vogue Italia cover with in 1991. The names on the masthead change; the system underneath does not, much.

Where the comparison does not hold

The 90s supermodel era was a print-and-television phenomenon. The Vogues were monthly, the supermodels appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and Late Night with David Letterman, the campaigns ran in outdoor and in TV spots. The Gigi era is a print-and-Instagram phenomenon, with the Vogue covers still on the masthead but the cultural reach increasingly running through a social account that Gigi and her team curate themselves.

The difference shows up in the texture of the public visibility. The 90s supermodels were less directly accessible to audiences than the Hadid generation; the relationship between Linda and her readers was mediated by magazine editors and television hosts in a way the relationship between Gigi and her seventy-eight million Instagram followers is not. Whether that is good or bad depends on whom you ask, although the 90s names themselves, Linda Evangelista in her 2022 People interviews, Naomi Campbell in her ongoing podcast work, are mostly clear that the older system was harder on everyone involved.

The second difference is the celebrity overlap. Cindy Crawford married Richard Gere; Stephanie Seymour was Axl Rose's girlfriend. The cultural-press attention those relationships drew is comparable, in 2024 terms, to the attention drawn by Gigi's 2015-to-2021 relationship with Zayn Malik, her 2022-to-2023 visibility with Leonardo DiCaprio, and her current relationship with Bradley Cooper. The difference is that the contemporary celebrity-overlap conversation is faster, more sustained, and more easily integrated into a model's commercial work, partly because the social-media infrastructure carries it directly.

Why the comparison still keeps being made

The April 2024 Vogue Italia "New Supermodels" cover, which photographed Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell alongside Gigi, Bella, Kendall and Imaan Hammam, was the first time the comparison was formalised at the level of the editorial industry itself. The fact that the 90s cohort agreed to share the cover with the contemporary one is the strongest endorsement the comparison has received, and it confirmed something the trade press had been circling for a decade.

What the 2024 cover acknowledged is that the contemporary model is allowed, again, to be a personality. The intervening 2000s and early 2010s had run a quieter register; the Brazilian generation, Gisele Bündchen and Alessandra Ambrosio and Adriana Lima, was famous within fashion and reasonably anonymous outside it. The Hadid-led 2014-to-2024 cohort restored the broader cultural reach that had been the 90s signature, partly by reactivating the same editorial relationships, partly by extending them through social.

For the broader 90s context, our profile of Naomi Campbell's modeling career covers the era from inside the work, and our Cindy Crawford makeup routine covers the commercial-and-beauty side of the same decade.

What a working career borrows from both eras

The structural lesson from holding the two eras up against each other is that the supermodel framework is mostly an editorial one. The 90s cohort and the Hadid cohort have both built durable careers off the same foundation: a development-focused agency, a major Marc Jacobs or Versace or Prada casting that credentialed the rest of the season, a parallel commercial track that paid for the long career, a public-personality layer that compounded the visibility, and a founder-side business in the third decade that converted the face into an asset. Gigi's Guest in Residence knitwear brand, founded in 2022, is the version of that final step, and the structural parallel to Cindy Crawford's Meaningful Beauty or Kathy Ireland's brand portfolio is not coincidental.

For an aspiring model in 2026, the most useful version of the comparison is the structural one rather than the inspirational. The editorial system that ran the 90s supermodel era is mostly the same system that runs the contemporary one, and the structural decisions a model makes inside it are also mostly the same. Find the right office. Take the casting that credentials the season. Run the parallel commercial track. Build the asset on the back end. The 90s answered those questions; the Hadid generation has answered them again. That part of the modeling industry has been more stable, across thirty years, than almost any other part of fashion.

The version of that career an emerging face has in front of her, with the agencies and digitals and first-year decisions still to be made, sits in our how to become a model industry insider guide.