Yolanda Hadid did not aspire to be a model when she was younger. Things kicked into gear when she was only 16 because she needed money to support her mother and brother. Hadid told Larry King that she was 7 when her father died in a car accident and the trauma changed her forever. “I remember sitting at the church in my little town and looking to the side and seeing my mom and my brother, my family all in tears,” she told King. “In that moment, I made the choice, like, ‘okay, I’m the one that has to be tough and strong to take care of all of them.”
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She did, indeed! Hadid’s hometown, Papendrecht in Holland, was so small that she had never seen a fashion magazine before she began working as a model, she told W Magazine. “I was not educated at all, and I was kind of thrown into [modeling] by accident — or maybe because it was my destiny, but at the time it felt like an accident,” she said. However, Hadid said that her mother gave her a wonderful work ethic that proved useful in climbing the ladder as a model, and it worked. According to Vogue, she blew up in the 80s and 90s.
