Gigi Hadid turned 31 on Thursday, April 23, and Sports Illustrated Swimsuit marked the occasion by looking back at one of the defining stretches of her early modeling run. The three-time SI Swimsuit model first posed for the magazine in 2014 and returned in the next two years, including a 2016 feature shot in the Islands of Tahiti.
That Tahiti trip captured the pressure she put on herself even at the height of her rise. Hadid, working with visual artist Yu Tsai, said she was hard on herself and described how the light and tide left little room to miss: there was only so much time before the perfect moment passed and the water rose too high. “I have to get this right,” she recalled thinking as the shoot unfolded.
Before Tahiti, Hadid’s first SI Swimsuit appearance came in 2014 with photographer Ben Watts along the Jersey Shore, followed by another return the next year in Kauai, Hawai’i. By the time of the 2016 shoot, she had already become a familiar face far beyond the swim issue, landing covers of Vogue, V Magazine, W, Elle, InStyle, Harper’s Bazaar and others.
The retrospective lands at a moment when Hadid’s career has moved well past the runway. She is now also a business founder, having launched Guest in Residence in September 2022 with a core collection of cashmere basics that has since expanded into women’s and men’s clothing, including dresses, jumpsuits, cardigans and jackets. She is also the proud mom of one, which makes the 2016 photos feel even more like a snapshot of a young model racing the clock for the shot she wanted.
What makes the birthday tribute resonate is not just the nostalgia. It is that Hadid has not posed for the annual SI Swimsuit Issue in a decade, so the Tahiti images now read as a marker of the moment she was becoming a star while already worrying over every frame. That is the through line in her career: the model, the entrepreneur and the mother all still visible in the same person, even as the industry around her keeps moving.
