Ace designer Tommy Hilfiger has said that he was upset to have model Gigi Hadid walk his runway in the red poncho after his casting director deemed her not as thin as the other girls.
Hilfiger had made this revelation about his casting director’s views in an interview with Yahoo! Style.
“Our casting director said, ‘She doesn’t really fit because you know she’s not quite as tall as the other girls, she’s not quite as thin’,” the fashion mogul recalled.
“So they put a red, white and blue poncho on her. It covered a lot of her body, unfortunately, but it received millions of hits,” he continued.
After the interview with Yahoo! Style was published, Hilfiger received criticism for insinuating that Hadid was fat.
Responding to the backlash, he told the New York post that he was also upset that Hadid had to cover her body in that poncho.
“The casting people put Gigi in the poncho, and I was not happy. I was saying, ‘Don’t hide her body.’ Even though the poncho ended up being the best-selling piece, I was very unhappy,” he explained. “The suggestion that I thought she wasn’t thin enough upsets me to no end.”
Hilfiger went on calling Hadid, the face of his brand, “the epitome of perfection.”
He continued, “I am proud to have her as the face of my brand and proud to have her collaborate with me. There’s no other girl like her in the entire fashion world – not only because of her beauty, but because of her style. We worked with her to design a line – designers don’t usually let models design with them – she had a style we thought was incredible.”
He also pointed out that he had Hadid wear a bikini during another fashion show in New York. “She opened and closed the show in the bikini, because she’s our No 1 model,” he said.
“She would not be the Tommy girl if I didn’t think she was perfection, the It girl of today, not just because of her face, not just because of her body, but because of who she is.
