Perhaps the best gossip to come out of New York Fashion Week is that Leonardo DiCaprio was pursuing Gigi Hadid. She, a model, was at New York Fashion Week. He, a fan of models, was also there. They “were spotted,” per Page Six, at his friend Richie Akiva’s party at a loft in SoHo. Last week, in a report from People, someone anonymous claimed they were “getting to know each other.” And from Page Six, they were mostly “hanging out with groups,” and “solo a handful of times.” Particularly that one NYFW night, in celebration of Akiva, “Leo was with his guy friends and Gigi was with her model friends and they were all hanging out at a table.” Also: “[DiCaprio] is not someone who is in-and-out of relationships. He doesn’t jump around hooking up. They are taking it slow.”
The question now, besides what is “it” exactly, must be how slow are they taking “it”? This Monday, Hadid shared a photo in her Instagram Stories at her daughter Khai’s second birthday, tagging her coparent, Zayn Malik. “Our angel girl turned 2 today,” she wrote alongside a photo of the child’s cake. It’s safe to assume that DiCaprio wasn’t there, right? He likes to party. He loves yachts and clubs. But a toddler’s birthday doesn’t seem like his scene.
And therein lies the rub. Listen, I’ll say it. The timing of these anonymously sourced placements is weird. News of DiCaprio’s young loves was never a big secret, and people have always talked about it, but it finally reached an unavoidable tenor after his breakup with Camila Morrone. Even Kenan Thompson, a respected man in showbiz, made a joke about it at the Emmys, which is an awards show DiCaprio did not attend, but a lot of folks in the audience must know the guy (“Zendaya just turned 26 last week—happy birthday,” the joke went. “Twenty-six is a weird age in Hollywood. I mean, you’re young enough to play a high school student, but you’re too old to date Leonardo DiCaprio.”) So it’s out there in a way that’s maybe new.
It would do him good to change the conversation a little, and maybe show that he can get out of his comfort zone. Past performance famously doesn’t predict future results, but just so we’re all on the same page: DiCaprio and his last eight public girlfriends broke up before or around when they turned 25, according to a graph circulating on Reddit that was updated post-Morrone breakup. The actor is a mere 20 years older than Hadid, rather than 23 years older than the last woman he broke up with. Hadid is a mother of a two-year-old, which feels like a level of responsibility DiCaprio has heretofore avoided. It all seems a little out of his range.
On the other hand, Hadid is a model, which he famously loves.
What to believe? I think until there are photographs of them together canoodling or hand-holding or straight-up smooching, we won’t know for sure. There is one photo of him looking like he is saying something in Hadid’s ear at said Akiva party, but we can only feel good using a couple name in earnest once Gigi Hadid boards a yacht alongside DiCaprio somewhere off the coast of France.
Until then, feel free to keep workshopping it. GeoDi. LeoGi. LiGi. DiGi. GiDi. HadiDi. As long as it sounds like a minor character in the Super Mario universe, it’ll play.