Everything
You can be anything when you’re Anwar Hadid. Other people realised that before he did.
When he was 16 years old, Anwar was handpicked for superstardom.Even at a young age, it was readily apparent to the same powers that embraced his sisters that Anwar had something special too, and in what seemed like a blink of an eye, he was invited onto the world stage along with them.
Still in high school, Anwar signed with IMG Models, and soon after he was on the Moschino runway alongside his sisters. Soon after, he found himself on magazine covers, walking for brands such as Ralph Lauren and fronting Valentino fragrance campaigns. There was a path paved with gold before him. The trouble was, he wasn’t ready to walk it, because he didn’t yet know who he was, let alone who he wanted to be.
“I would never say anything bad about it. Honestly, getting into the fashion world was a beautiful experience,” Hadid tells ICON. “There’s so much creativity behind it, and so many beautiful people, inside and out. But when you’re not attuned to yourself, and you go into a world like that, then you’re inevitably going to be portrayed to the world in a way you can’t control.”
When we talk to Hadid now, it’s clear he’s had time to find himself. He’s 24 – eight years on from his first step into the public eye – and while he’ll readily admit he still has a lot of growing to do, he’s attuned to himself, and it focuses his every action. After we’ve spent some time with him, it became clear that he’s also deeply empathetic and focused on those around him. He evaluates the people he talks to with clear-eyed kindness, digging through their words and energy to find their intentions and to see if their soul can connect with his own. He’s become a man of others, a man focused on community, and it’s clear that didn’t happen by accident. It happened, rather, because things got hard, and he knew that the only path to his fulfilment would be the hard path, not the gilded one that others had carved up for him.
“I felt the effects of living without integrity – of loving someone else’s idea of my life. But it’s more than that, actually – I’ve lived the unconscious version of Anwar’s life.”
There’s been a lot of study, and a lot of healing to get here. Some of it becomes clear just in the terms he uses. At one point he casually references The Four Agreements, a 1997 book based on Toltec wisdom that outlines key ways to improve one’s life: “Be impeccable with your word”, “Do not take anything personally”, “Do not make assumptions”, “Always do your best”.
“Those things just help keep you aligned with where you are and where you’re supposed to be,” Anwar explains.
To figure out where he was supposed to be, Anwar first had to look backwards. “I spend a lot of time looking back at the past. There’s so much inspiration for me there,” he says. There’s one key moment that he always comes back to. It sticks in his mind because it was the first time he felt the gap between who he was and who he could be. He was a 15-year-old kid at a Red Hot Chili Peppers show, and staring at the stage and feeling their energy, something stirred within him. “It was the first time I went to a concert, and I was so angry because I knew that I was supposed to be up there.” He went home and he decided he would be a musician, but abandoned it almost immediately after. “I just didn’t think that dream had a chance in my mind. I thought to myself, there’s no way. It’s not possible. And I forgot about it,” he explains. “I would try to make music, and it never felt right.”
Now, Anwar realises he was both right and wrong to abandon that dream. He was right in one sense – he was never meant to be the lonely star on the stage. Rather, he would have to find his people and build his community, and then it would all fall into place. “It started a few years later when I met my friend Joey Francis,” says Anwar.
“When we started playing together, I realised that this was the place I could really express myself. I found self-actualisation through friendship. Suddenly, I didn’t care about money or fame. I wanted to see my friends become the greatest version of themselves, and it was something I knew we could do through our shared passion.”
Today, Joey and Anwar are two of the five members of Oswald, a rising band that’s a defiant throwback to a less lonely era of music. In a way, being in a band at all is an anachronism. Anwar could have easily gone to the same people that made him a star in the modelling world and said he wanted to be a pop star, too. They would have brought him the best songwriters, the top producers, and the most expensive image consultants. They would have heard the talent in his voice, and he would have been another readymade industry creation. The hits would have kept coming, but it wouldn’t have been him. There’s no community in that kind of stardom – not the kind he was intent on building.
With a band, he could create something different. With a band, he was on the hard path, but it was a path they were all on together. “I think you grow better with people,” he explains. “I’ve seen people fall off alone, but when you have the right friends, the friends that stick around no matter what, through the ups and downs, that’s how you know you’ll get where you need to be. With these guys, we’ve been through it all together, already, and it’s made us so strong.”
“That’s why our music is a real expression of goodness, because we’re five people on the same path, with the same ideas, building a future for each other.”
Building that bond between them has allowed them to interact with the world differently. Now, every show becomes about building that community outwards in their reflection. Their concerts are a way to pass on that connection to everyone in the room, and hopefully create something bigger. Put simply, he’s trying to create a movement. “Above all, we hope that our friendship and our music plants a piece of this in people’s minds. We want people to look at us and see clearly that you get farther in life with the right team, the right souls, the right mission,” he says. “You may be one person, and as much as you want to think you’re a tank, you’re not. Humanity is about unity and oneness within that. Individuals play an important role; they bring their own passions, but coming together into a circle of souls that are doing the same thing is very powerful. That’s what inspired me about bands. I love the friendship. I want to make something beyond the singular. The stuff that we’ve let happen in our world with music is too much. We need some soul – we need some family.”
Funny he should mention family, because for a long time, none of the Hadids knew Anwar was making music at all. “I didn’t tell anybody in the family that I was making music for three years,” he admits. There was a reason for that. Hadid was on his own journey. He was finding himself, and he knew part of that growth had to happen away from him. He was also dealing with heartbreak, he tells us. But it was actually his mother’s guidance that led him to take that time for himself, before bringing them in on what he and his friends had been working so hard on. “I was really locked in. I was living in Los Angeles, away from my family. I have five sisters – that’s a lot of sisters. I’m my mom’s only son, and she raised me like a wolf,” he says.
“She raised me to live and be in tune with that part of myself. She always allowed me to exercise my freedom, to be the person I am. I think that was a really formative thing – that’s the reason I am who I am today. I was always free to express myself and be creative. I may not have found the thing to focus my creativity on until later in life, but I had it stirring within me. That was definitely my mom and my father – who’s a very creative person as well,” he says, referring to Mohamed Hadid. “He’s an architect, he wrote poetry, he was always so inspired.”
He’ll admit, however, that part of the reason he didn’t tell them was that he was scared.
“It was scary for me to embrace the person that I was in the first place. I was in a place of real self-discovery. I wasn’t ready for my family to embrace who I was, because I wasn’t sure who I was yet. I really had to dive into the cocoon. I had to craft and sharpen myself. I had to show them a version of myself that I could be proud of. I don’t just do this to walk around and say I make music, you know? I do it because it’s a need for me. And I couldn’t show them that until I knew I could be proud of what I was showing them.”
When he finally got himself there, and he was proud of the music he and the band Oswald had created together, he took a deep breath and sent his sister a track. “I went very slowly. I sent my sister Bella some stuff. She would give me little reviews and fun bits of feedback. Then I sent more of my songs to my sisters, and they would tell me things like, ‘It’s so loud! We want to hear your voice!’” he laughs. “Even if that was just some small things from my beautiful sisters, I appreciated all of it. It meant the world to me.”
Last year, a year after he’d started sending his songs to his sisters, an even bigger moment came. Anwar came with Oswald to the East Coast for a tour, playing shows across New York, Philadelphia, and much more. And when his band was rehearsing in Pennsylvania, he invited his family to come watch.
“That was such a beautiful experience. It was exactly why I love this process. Because we were up there baring our souls. There was no auto-tune, it was real, raw, rock music. It was me and my friends – no backing tracks, just pure feeling. That’s how you want it to feel with people you love. You want to show them the truth of what you’ve been doing,” says Anwar. “And after we played, I looked in the corner, and my mom was crying. That made me so happy. I got to make my mom proud, you know?”
There’s another key aspect of the way Anwar’s family raised him. Even now, it’s the one part of himself that he’s never questioned – his Palestinian heritage. That is part of why he was set on being a public figure, knowing that he would find a way to share his talents with the world. The people of Palestine have been disenfranchised for so long, pushed to the margins of society and culture. His sisters and parents have long put their heritage front and centre in everything that they do, partially in defiance of a world that seemingly wants to ignore that aspect of who they are. Because of that, their fame has always mattered more than it might otherwise. They are not mere celebrities; they are conduits that have introduced the world to Palestinian culture – that emboldened the entire Palestinian community across the world.
“I want the world to see the Palestinian people,” Anwar explains. “That’s the most beautiful experience for me. I think the Palestinian people have been shushed for a long time. To be able to be who you are freely and say ‘I’m proud to be a Palestinian person. I am a human being,’ is everything. It’s about where you come from, your family, the things you love, the food you eat. All of these different things. It’s about allowing that to exist freely within your body and your soul. We live freely, and so we live fully,” he continues.
But part of being part of a community, whether it’s his musical community or his Palestinian community, is about embracing what makes each member of that community unique, and then coming together to support each person’s individual spirit. There is no one way to be Palestinian, Anwar explains, and that’s what makes being Palestinian so beautiful. Hadid has now gone to Palestine multiple times, first to shoot a music video for his song “Progression 101”, filmed on 8mm film with his Italian-Palestinian filmmaker friend Vin Arfuso. He and Arfuso then returned to produce a documentary called Walled Off, which highlights Palestinian resistance in the West Bank.
What’s important to him in both experiences is how embraced he felt – and what that said about being Palestinian. He saw the pure spirit of Palestine, and he wanted even more to share it with the world. “There’s so much life, and so much culture, in Palestine. And the people there are so accepting. I went there with dyed blonde hair. I’m Palestinian, yes, but I’m from California. I have tattoos. But when I went there, I was accepted as a boy from Jericho. The people there were feeding me, inviting me into their houses. No one was letting us pay for food,” Anwar says.
“It’s a beautiful culture, It’s full of beautiful people that really care about the people in their community, whether they’re living far away or they are their next-door neighbours.”
“It’s so different from the way that some ideologies in the West want to paint it. It’s such a powerful community because it’s about love, first and foremost.”
Since the current tragedy in Gaza began in October, that message has become even more central to Anwar’s life. On his social media, he shares what’s happening in Gaza every day, always sharing messages about Palestinian culture with it, centring the humanity of his people at a time when it would be easier for many to ignore it. He’s also well aware that because he’s found so much fame, with more than seven million followers on Instagram, his voice can rise above the fray, and if he continues to post, he can help change hearts and minds far beyond what many others can manage. Just like it does on stage, on social media, his voice echoes, and he uses it with a clear-mindedness that has only been aided by a journey of personal discovery.
And as much as the pain of what’s happening might make him want to shut down and turn himself off to the world at times, he knows that the more he puts his face out there, the more that he raises his voice, the more he honours Palestine. “You’ve got to honour that. That’s my whole thing. I’m trying to get it right. I have to keep moving forward. We’re here for a reason – we’re here to hold down for our people. We’re here to hold down for truth. We Palestinians, we keep going,” Anwar says. “I want to help lift all of our people, everybody in the world. I want the youth to rise up. There’s a lot of change that needs to happen, and there’s a lot of space for our beautiful people in that change,” he continues.
Maybe it’s that spirit of unity, but Anwar is no longer the wolf hiding out away from his family, discovering himself and his music. He’s still working through himself, getting better each day and learning more about who he is each day, that he’ll readily admit. But he’s never alone now. He’s always with his band, his family, the Palestinian people. He’s a man of community. His family notices it all the time. “We have a big family group chat, and we’re always talking. It’s such a good vibe. It might seem silly, but think on a personality level, on a soul level, this is a way I can see my own growth. I can see how much this has all affected me, you know?” Anwar explains.
The Hadids don’t just have one group chat, however.
“There’s actually three or four. We have like, ‘Fam New’, ‘Family’, and ‘La Familia’. They all were born at different times, but they’re all still active because my dad can’t tell the difference between them so they start popping off at different moments in time,” he laughs.
The more he spends time with his family, the more he chats with them, sharing news, memes, jokes and comments, the more he realises that his personal growth away from them has only made him more into one of them. Even as the one brother amongst many sisters, he can see the ways that has shaped the way he respects women, and embraces his feminine side. “There’s so many things they instilled in me that I really appreciate now. I can go into my life and see those attributes. I’m proud of them, and I get to be proud of them in return. When I look at those parts of myself, I love them even more because I see that they came from people that I respect, people that I love so much. I care about them, and I do anything for them. It’s beautiful. It inspires me,” says Anwar.
“Now, I’m always the one trying to bring the family together, I’m always trying to rile everyone up,” he says, breaking for a smile. “We’re just better when we’re together.”
SEE THE FULL PHOTO SHOOT WITH ANWAR HADID HERE.
Photography: Nabil Elderkin
Fashion Direction: Qwan Anthony
Photography Assistant: Zeinab Gregorio
Fashion Assistant: Nik Van Dalen
Grooming & Makeup: Nena Melendez
Videography: Fiona Nova
Media Assistant: Garrett Alvarado
Communications Manager: Johana V. Dana
Producer: Giulia Di Stravola
Talent: Anwar Hadid
Talent: Oswald Band: Brain Foarde, Joey Francis, Ray Belli, Zaach Page
THIS FEATURE IS PUBLISHED IN THE 12TH EDITION OF ICON PRINT MAGAZINE. ORDER YOUR COPY HERE.
TOP BANNER IMAGE: FROM LEFT, ANWAR WEARS PRINTED COTTON SHIRT, SHOP NOW, COTTON SHORTS, SHOP SIMILAR, RE-NYLON AND LEATHER BACKPACK, SHOP NOW, PRADA. SOCKS, STYLIST’S OWN. EARRINGS, ANWAR’S OWN. JOEY WEARS SINGLE BREASTED COTTON JACKET, SHOP SIMILAR, COTTON SHORTS, SHOP SIMILAR, TROUSERS, SHOP SIMILAR, PRADA. RAY WEARS SINGLE BREASTED MOHAIR WOOL JACKET, SHOP SIMILAR, WOOL AND MOHAIR SHORTS, SHOP SIMILAR, PRADA. STOCKINGS, STYLIST’S OWN. BRAIN WEARS RE-NYLON JACKET, SHOP SIMILAR, COTTON SHORTS, SHOP SIMILAR, PRADA. SOCKS, STYLIST’S OWN. ZAACH WEARS SINGLE BREASTED DENIM JACKET, SHOP SIMILAR, DENIM TROUSERS, SHOP SIMILAR, PRADA
