Anwar Hadid loves the smell of eucalyptus in the morning. Or lavender. The 20-year-old model and musician is describing the scents he usually gravitates toward, and the hiking-trail list he rattles off pegs him as a Los Angeles native. (He just happens to have grown up in a 35,000-square-foot Bel Air manse, alongside his sisters, Gigi and Bella. You have probably heard of them.) “I like smells of the outdoors,” he explains on a recent afternoon at New York’s Edition Hotel, where the neighboring Madison Square Park serves up a bouquet of dewy greenery and Shake Shack fries. But for Hadid, taste is an evolution. “I probably have a bottle of Axe somewhere in my house from high school, from so long ago,” he says. Was it really that long ago? It is when your life unfolds at the speed of Instagram, and time is measured in posts: shirtless portrait in Paris, Super 8 footage from Palestine, birthday tribute to grandma. (“I got all my favorite traits from you!! The strongest person I know inside and out,” reads the caption.)
The latest addition to Hadid’s olfactory canon is wafting through the hotel suite: violet leaves and vetiver, with a spicy zip of ginger. It’s the new Valentino fragrance, called Born in Roma (as indeed the house’s creative director, Pierpaolo Piccioli, was). While the women’s version hit counters last week, this is a preview of the forthcoming uomo cologne, which debuts in September with a proper Paris Fashion Week fête. Hadid and the South Sudan–born model Adut Akech serve as the faces of the campaign, which has them speeding through the Italian countryside dressed in a leather jacket (his) and voluminous rose-colored gown (hers). That kind of yardage seems risky on a motorcycle, but Hadid confesses that a stunt double did the driving in the video, which also drops this fall. “I actually do ride bikes, but I guess I wasn’t allowed to. I was trying to ask!” he says with playful exasperation. Rest assured, the hip-hop scene filmed inside the 17th-century Villa Aldobrandini was the vero Hadid. “The dance party was amazing. We had a lot of fun.”
In an age of gender fluidity, what does it mean to demarcate the sexes with companion black and pink bottles? “They’re different colors, but they have the same spikes and hold the same energy,” Hadid says, waxing philosophical. “I have that tattooed on me—‘Same but different’—because I have friends that are Muslim, Christian, Jewish, black, Asian, Arab, white. Everything. We’re all brothers or sisters at the end of the day.” Meanwhile, his latest ink is another kind of mash note. “I got this one two days ago. It’s 528 Hz, which is the frequency of love,” he says, without elaboration. Google offers more clues that won’t exactly pass this magazine’s fact-checking muster: how a scientist supposedly used the frequency to purify samples of oil-polluted water from the Gulf of Mexico, how some people think it can help repair damaged DNA.
“I have so many weird tattoos that at one point meant something to me, but no longer do,” Hadid says, when asked if there are any regrettable early ones—the equivalent, say, of a dude-posturing teenage body spray. After all, skin—inked or perfumed—is a communication tool, an outward projection of an identity. But he is no apologist. “I find it so beautiful that at one point I could have cared about something so much to have gotten it tattooed on my body. I have to respect who I was at that moment,” he muses. “For me, these are reminders—[the way] a scent can be a reminder of a time in your life.”
For a guy whose streetwise wardrobe runs from shredded T-shirts to paint-spattered pants, working with Valentino is a flag firmly planted in high fashion. “It’s just classic, to me,” he says with the right amount of reverence. “It’s a very well-known brand and has been here for a long time”—nearly three Anwar Hadids, if his age were a unit of measurement. But that’s history, and this is now, the great, blazing summer of 2019. Last week, Piccioli sent a parade of couture confections down the Paris runway, with spot-on color mashups and theatrical headpieces. As for Hadid’s summer hit list, it goes something like this:
Quintessential smell: “Coconut reminds me of summer—edible coconut, not the synthetic [scent of tanning oil]. I grew up going to Mexico a lot when I was younger, and the only thing I would care about was going to get coconuts off the trees and cut them open. It’s kind of nostalgia. Also, my sister Bella worked at SunLife, this vitamin/juice place, for like three years. I used to go there after school, and she would make me coconut water.”
Sun strategy: “I don’t sit out to get tan, but I love when I do because it just feels good. I feel like I get rejuvenated from the sun—like my body needs it.”
Favorite beach: “There’s this beach called Little Dume, in Malibu. You need a key; it’s for the locals. Shh! I shouldn’t have said that. It’s my favorite beach because my friends always go down there, and it’s comfortable. I used to surf a lot, but I will go there just for the sun—early enough, like 10:30 or 11 a.m., so you’re there when it gets hot.”
Go-to ice cream flavor: “I love ice cream. Mint chip, classic. But I also like sorbet—lemon, and also there’s this tangerine sorbet that I had once in Rome.”
Summer shoe: “Sandals freak me out, with the toes. I like the what’s-it-called sandals—slides—where you can wear socks with them. But my favorite shoes for the summer are just Vans. Slip them on, throw them off, get them dirty.”
Soundtrack on repeat: “This artist named Rudeboy, who I’m working with. He’s just the truth. He spits exactly what he grew up in, and you can just hear it in his voice. He’s mad good. I respect his art.”
Wish list destination: “I want to go to Perth, Australia. I’ve never been before. I feel like I could make some cool music there because it’s so calm and beautiful.”
Poolside drink: “Piña colada. It’s classic.”
High-heat survival mode: “I just wear big, flowy clothes. You know those [inflatable] things at the gas station? You just become one of those. It’s perfect. You can just be the wind.”
