On March 13, 2025, the official Instagram account for Vogue magazine, perhaps the most prolific voice of popular fashion in this country, posted a short-form video of model Gigi Hadid and co-stars decked out in 1960s costumes and hair, dancing to a song from the musical Hairspray. The caption simply read “Gigi Hadid Can’t Stop The Beat” in reference to the title of the song in the video, “You Can’t Stop The Beat”.
The backlash was almost immediate.
“Replacing the most iconic plus-size main lead in musical theatre history with a size 0 supermodel is NOT ok,” pointed out one commenter. “Oh! So all the plus-size models were busy hm?” wrote another.
Why were they all furious? Because Hairspray is a musical about a teenage girl from Baltimore, Maryland, who, despite being bullied for her weight, joins a TV dance show, fights for racial integration, and wins over the hearts of her city through the power of dance. It’s about courage in the face of discrimination, and about how everyone deserves to be judged by what’s inside, not just what you can see. When Vogue did Hairspray, a conventionally attractive, model-thin crowd of dancers in perfect costumes with perfect hair spun through the aesthetic of the show without stopping to consider the implications and meaning of the source material. The poorly thought-out campaign lit up three glaring points of needed change in the fashion industry: inclusion, sensitivity, and, most importantly, reduced judgment of appearances. These are hardly new needs, but they are consistent, unchanging barriers to the progress of the industry and the perceived value of fashion as an art form.
The most obvious detractor from the success of the Vogue campaign was their failure to include a model who is representative of the community that Tracy Turnblad (the main character of the musical) was a part of. Gigi Hadid is undeniably a great model, but she didn’t quite fit the bill for this role. If anything, she more strongly resembles Amber Von Tussle, Tracy’s bully, and she would likely have been better suited to that character.
For a campaign used to promote Hadid’s latest stint as the magazine’s cover star, why wouldn’t Vogue’s editors and designers have picked an adaptation of a musical that she more effortlessly fit into? It is easy to see her as Elle Woods in a Legally Blonde tribute, Regina George in a Mean Girls-themed shoot, or maybe even as Roxie Hart in Chicago if they wanted her to have an edge. Picking Hairspray as their inspiration was likely an intentional choice to show that Hadid is branching out as a model, that she can handle stylized work and new ideas, but that could have been done just as well with a different musical. By not centering a campaign like this around a plus-sized model or an otherwise disenfranchised member of the modeling industry, Vogue shows a stunning lack of regard for the source material and shines a white-hot spotlight on the intense biases that they perpetuate in the beauty and fashion world.
It’s not exactly a new thing for Vogue and similar magazines to body shame. One commenter even wrote under Hadid’s video, “Anti-fatness for Vogue? Groundbreaking,” a tie back to another notoriously fatphobic fashion maven, this time of the fictional variety—The Devil Wears Prada’s Miranda Priestly. It is a generally accepted standard for models to be thin. “Sample size,” if you will. Plus-size models have been continuously and relentlessly excluded from the fashion space. In recent years, there has been an attempt by Vogue and other creators to “accept and represent” larger models. But each time they make a stride in this direction, like naming Paloma Elsesser Model of the Year in 2023, they reel themselves a mile backwards with works like Hadid’s video. This leaves every bit of progress in the realm of model diversity seeming highly performative and, if one dares to say, corporate. There’s no energy behind the projects for non-traditional models, the way that there is for projects for traditional models. Simply put, Vogue would rather commit a major pop culture snafu and scoff in the face of representation than showcase anyone other than one of their cookie-cutter models. In their business model, no backlash can overpower their need to maintain their archaic image.
This pushes us onto one of the central issues of recent Vogue work: their inability to maintain an appealing online presence.
The online world is one of instant gratification, and by holding firm to their old ideas about who gets to be pretty, Vogue fails to make their art accessible. Accessibility is rarely the focus of the high-fashion world, a realm of haves desperately pressing their external superiority to a world of have-nots. But in cyberspace, everyone wants to feel like they can do everything. The Vogue world simply cannot integrate their mindset with the one people want to see, the one where exclusion is a thing of the past, and one where audiences can see themselves in the people they watch while scrolling through their iPhone. The two ideas don’t reconcile easily.
The average person can’t see themselves in Gigi Hadid however, they could see themselves in Tracy Turnblad, whether or not they look like her. Everyone has been the underdog at some point, so when you watch Hairspray, you root for Tracy. When she succeeds, gets the guy, and wins her fight to integrate television, you celebrate! It feels like anything is possible. It feels like nothing can get you down. When you watch Hadid twirl around in thousand-dollar dresses with her fabulous castmates, you feel different from her. She seems to be shrouded in a world you cannot touch. The effect is not uplifting, it’s uneasy.
By trying to tackle Hairspray, Vogue fails to hit any of the iconic musical’s central points. It makes no attempt to be inclusive, silently sending a blaring message about who they think deserves to be beautiful and fashionable. If anything, it takes a masterpiece about being yourself and standing up to bullies, and creates the perfect ecosystem for cruelty. When a video can make the majority of audience members feel bad about themselves, it naturally invites its audience to throw those feelings straight back at its stars. Vogue unintentionally pushes Hadid directly into the throes of comments on her own skill, talent, and, most unfortunately, her body. It is known in the fashion world that the Hadid sisters have been under intense pressure to stay thin and model-perfect their entire lives. Surrounding your cover star in negativity about one of her most well-known insecurities is probably not the best way to promote your new issue. Vogue leads Hadid to the slaughter. Let’s face it: regardless of controversy, Vogue will remain the paramount fashion magazine, and Anna Wintour will always sit as the monarch of the high fashion industry, but Hadid? She’s replaceable. She’s cancellable. The vast majority of the backlash for a piece like this is going to hit the artists, not the institution. We don’t know how involved Hadid was in the creation of the campaign, but it doesn’t really matter. She’s the face of the campaign, and thus, she’s the target for the tomatoes.
So why does this all matter?
Vogue remains, undoubtedly, a central force in arts and culture. When they do a campaign like this poorly, it is bound to make headlines. It’s very easy to say something like “It’s just a video!” or “It’s just fashion!” or even “Who even cares?” when looking at a piece like this. Fashion is rarely taken seriously as an art form, and that sentiment is perpetuated by out-of-touch campaigns like this one. The reason that this campaign and what it stands for, or rather, what it doesn’t stand for, is such a big deal is because taking beloved art about equality and turning it into a gated wonderland for the elite is another giant step through the pattern we’ve all grown so weary of.
When Vogue does Hairspray, they write their own exposé. Showing that while they live in their ‘60s dreamworld of thin women and bright colors, they keep their iron gates bolted shut to the aspirational models and artists, and the average man. Vogue doesn’t deal with the common folk, and we won’t be getting a piece of Vogue any time soon.
You’re better off watching Hairspray again.
