Eman Bare, a Muslim writer, praised the sister publication’s decision: “ Vogue Arabia could have used a women in a scarf, or a Middle-Eastern icon, but they used an American. Last week, it ran a piece entitled “The Importance of Gigi Hadid’s Vogue Arabia Cover in Donald Trump’s America”. Teen Vogue, which has become a source of trenchant political commentary under the stewardship of Elaine Welteroth, the magazine’s first African American editor, echoed those sentiments. So… maybe I’m pretty damn all American after all.” If I’m ‘all-American’, what does that even mean? But then again, my parents came to this country as poor immigrants. Last month, she told Vogue: “It’s funny to me when people say that I’m this ‘girl next door’ because, although I know I can come off that way, from another angle, I’m pretty exotic. To state the obvious, this is also not her fault. Her beauty is both remarkable and conventional. She is slim, light skinned, with long blond hair. Hadid’s look does not immediately conjure the word “diversity”. That statement, though simple, irrefutable and nobly put, fails to address the awkwardness of an industry grappling with identity politics. Hadid subsequently told Harper’s Bazaar: “We shouldn’t treat people as if they don’t deserve kindness just because of their ethnicities. It was widely denounced as Islamophobic and Hadid and Bella, her younger supermodel sister, were among the thousands who marched in protest in New York City. Donald Trump signed an executive order in January that forbade entry to refugees and immigrants from seven Muslim nations. A lot of hijab’d women really have no option to hide what they are.”Īs Róisín intimates, this is a difficult moment to be living in America as a Muslim woman. I understand navigating the world is one’s own journey, but as a Muslim woman of colour, I don’t have a lot of options to hide what I am. she wants to claim a space, like the cover of Vogue Arabia. Gigi Hadid, though I appreciate her lineage, hasn’t ever talked about her background and in many ways navigates the world passing as a white woman, which makes it tricky when. Photograph: Vogue Arabiaįariha Róisín, a Muslim writer and cultural critic, told the Observer: “One of the crucial reasons representation is important is because it allows people to be seen. Gigi Hadid on the cover of the first Vogue Arabia. Couldn’t they have used a Muslim model? Halima Aden, the Somali-American, hijab-wearing model and breakout star of Milan fashion week, was a name that kept coming up. Tweets were fired, many in the all-caps standard of online outrage, citing religious appropriation and speaking of the disappointment of a white girl from California being Vogue Arabia’s first cover star. Being half-Palestinian, it means the world to me to be on the first-ever cover of everyone was buying it. as a fashion community, we are able to celebrate, and share with the world, different cultures. On Thursday, she posted an image of the cover, which she captioned: “. Hadid is the daughter of Yolanda van den Herik, a Dutch-American model who features prominently on the reality TV show Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and Mohamed Hadid, a Palestine-born, Muslim, real-estate mogul. That garment is ambiguous, but within the magazine she’s wearing what is inarguably a hijab. Culturally, however, her presence on the cover of Vogue Arabia, where she appears in a bejewelled headscarf, is a lot trickier. Hadid, who has more than 30m followers on Instagram, makes supreme business sense as a cover girl. Now, directives are founded less on the speculative science of consumer trends and the hazy notion of zeitgeist and taste and more on the cold, hard numbers of social media followers. Most decisions in the fashion industry spring not from progressive ideals but from financial prudence. The image of Hadid in a headscarf sparked anxieties over representation and influence, illuminated fashion’s uneasy relationship between idealism and business, and, ultimately, reminded us of this young woman’s huge power. It was also, however, the first controversy of her hitherto carefully uncontroversial career. Last week, she appeared on the cover of the first Vogue Arabia, which was this 21-year-old veteran’s 17th Vogue cover. She is a new kind of supermodel, built via the popularity contest of social media, in which followers mean marketability. Gigi Hadid, the ubiquitous supermodel and global powerhouse, is the most visible example of how Instagram, a photo-sharing application founded in 2010, has become central to celebrity and the fashion industry. You had followers because of your career, rather than a career because of your followers. Not too long ago, a person’s social media following was an adjunct to their fame, rather than its foundation.
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