If you don't believe me, though, behold this video of Hadid literally staring into a camera for four consecutive minutes. 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. 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. Still haven’t subscribed to Glamour on YouTube? (Unless you were me, of course.
– "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."