Glamour 
 
 There’s a lot of talk in media these days about “pivoting to video,” the corporate-jargon catchphrase for what happens when a digital media organization lays off a bunch of journalists because it decides video is the future of web content and/or cheaper than paying writers. Glamour and parent company Condé Nast are no strangers to the attendant dilemma of figuring out how to adapt a business model that once worked well for print publications to a digital-first marketplace. In its latest salvo in the war for clicks, eyeballs, and engagement, Glamour appears to have skipped pivoting to video and invented a new tactic: pivoting to performance art. Now that longtime editor Cindi Leive is out the door, why aspire to be a fashion magazine when you can be a Marina Ambramović installation instead? 
 
 The magazine posted a video to its website on Wednesday of Gigi Hadid staring into the camera for four minutes. If you’re thinking that surely there’s more to the video than that, let me stop you right there: There’s not. It is just Gigi, looking straight ahead, sometimes blinking and smiling, for a full four minutes. (And if you don’t know who Gigi Hadid is, in brief: She’s a model, member of Taylor Swift’s #squad, older sister to Bella “If Homeboy Comes Through in These …” Hadid, and a member of the Extended Kardashian Universe.) 
 
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 Glamour touted the video as “weirdly mesmerizing,” adding that it slowed it down to heighten the eerie quality. “People should be putting this on their giant TVs during holiday parties instead of fireplace b-roll,” said Lauren Lumsden, executive producer at the magazine, in a statement. While I would love to attend a holiday party where a video of Gigi Hadid, or indeed any member of the Hadid family, plays in the background on an endless loop, I can’t echo the magazine’s contention that the video inspires any relaxing feelings or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. The blog post that accompanies the video calls Gigi Hadid a “staring champ,” but she doesn’t strike me as particularly talented at staring. For one thing, she blinks a bunch, so she’s not going to win any staring contests. There’s not much to read into her blank expression, though the woozy mood music playing over the video fills in some emotion. There’s not even a wind machine to change up how her hair is falling. The most exciting part of the video is a little over halfway through, when you think she’s going to open her mouth. She doesn’t. Classic fake-out. (Spoiler: At three minutes in, she really does open it, though! Nice!) I can name about 50 celebrities I would rather watch stare at the camera for four minutes, and in each of those cases, I would rather still watch the celebrity actually do something. Sorry, hypothetical Oscar Isaac video: We’re going to need some dialogue. 
 
 The Gigi video is probably the result of some enterprising video editor pulling the footage out from a photo shoot and turning it into an inside joke among staffers, but it’s just as fun to imagine that the editors at Glamour were so devoid of ideas that they asked Hadid to sit there and do nothing for a while on camera. It’s a good representation of how clueless many magazines are about how to produce good videos for the web and how equally baffled they are by nontraditional stars like Hadid, who, though a model, has become stratospherically famous for “doing nothing,” and therefore need not—and perhaps cannot—entertain audiences with more conventional talents and charms. This is how backward our world is, now: A video of a Hadid doing nothing makes a weird sort of sense. Of course! Brilliant! ||||| I'm sure you remember having staring contests with your friends as a kid. For whatever reason, our nine-year-old selves thought it was great fun to lock eyes with other kids for long stretches of time and just sit there. Silently. The first person to break eye contact lost the game, which meant it was so tempting to look in every other direction. What if you missed something major while staring at that weird kid from your science class? Like an ice cream truck? Or a new episode of SpongeBob SquarePants ? Or Santa Claus coming to your house IRL and hand-delivering your presents? All these thoughts ran through your mind during staring contests, but you stuck to your guns and emerged victorious. (Unless you were me, of course. I lost staring contests every time.) 
 
 Gigi Hadid , on the other hand, is a staring champ. She is a top model after all; "smizing" is kind of a requirement for the gig. If you don't believe me, though, behold this video of Hadid literally staring into a camera for four consecutive minutes. It'll shake your fourth grade self to the core. Hadid truly is the queen of eye contact. 
 
 And she's also one of Glamour 's 2017 Women of the Year ; she joins an impressive class that includes Nicole Kidman, Solange Knowles, Patty Jenkins, and Maxine Waters. Be sure to watch the live stream of the Women of the Year Summit, which takes place on November 13, to learn more. 
 
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 Gigi Hadid Just Revealed What's in Her New Maybelline Collection ||||| Published on Nov 1, 2017 
 
 See your past, present, and future in Gigi Hadid's eyes. The supermodel was named one of Glamour's Women of the Year for 2017. 
 
 
 
 Executive Video Producer/Director: Chiara Clemente, Sarah Lash, Tanya Selvaratnam 
 
 Director of Photography: Lisa Rinzler 
 
 
 
 Glamour Woman of the Year Gigi Hadid: http://bit.ly/2h0JrGH 
 
 
 
 Gigi Hadid hasn’t just taken off—she’s taken over. At only 22, she’s racked up both commercial success (Victoria’s Secret, Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Issue, a collection with Maybelline New York) and industry cred (the cover of Vogue, walking the Tom Ford show). Ask anyone who knows her, and they will quickly praise Hadid for her incredible work ethic—and most of all her kindness. And while a previous generation of models typically kept quiet, Hadid, who studied criminal psychology for two years at New York City’s The New School before pursuing modeling full-time, understands the power of the audience she’s built and has spoken out about issues from gun control to human rights to women’s personal safety. “I want to be the person who always uses my platform to share what I’m passionate about,” she says. Her followers—36 million and counting on Instagram—are listening. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 Gigi Hadid Stares at You For 4 Minutes | Glamour
– "Watching Gigi Hadid stare at you for four minutes is weirdly mesmerizing." That's the conclusion Glamour comes to, at least, upon the release of a video it produced that features Hadid. Staring, and occasionally blinking, in slow motion. For four minutes and nine seconds. And that's it (though she does laugh near the end, prompting one person to comment on YouTube, "3:53 melted my heart and make my eyes wet?"). At Slate, Heather Schwedel looks at where this fits in to the buzzy "pivot to video" that's underway in the media world, with more and more publications dumping journalists and shifting their resources to producing video. Her conclusion: "This is how backward our world is, now: A video of a Hadid doing nothing makes a weird sort of sense. Of course! Brilliant!" Schwedel speculates that this started out as an inside joke born from photo-shoot footage, but writes, "It’s just as fun to imagine that the editors at Glamour were so devoid of ideas that they asked Hadid to sit there and do nothing for a while on camera." And she sees the whole thing as reflective of "how clueless many magazines are about how to produce good videos for the web." But, she concedes, maybe this is a "step up," at least compared with the "glorified slideshows" that have become a popular approach to creating cheap videos. At Man Repeller, Amelia Diamond writes that she did get sucked in by the video, but the credit may not go to Hadid. "Could you have watched anyone for this long with the right song? I think maybe I could have. It’s strangely voyeuristic."