The Weird Prophetic Dreams of Aydan Nix

The fashion business is overrun by nepo babies, and others in Nix’s position might have seen this as an opportunity: to grow a following, to chase clout, to fast-track connections and brand deals. But that’s not her style. Aside from writing a graceful essay in The Cut about her experience, entitled “The Year the World Found Out I Was a Hadid,” she’s quietly worked behind the scenes as an assistant, save for a few stray modeling gigs. Nix spent her childhood in Florida, and only discovered the truth about her family three years before the public did; she took a DNA test after the father who raised her, Terry, came to her in a dream after his sudden passing: “That’s a big reason I took the 23andMe test. [Terry] was telling me, ‘Look into your father, look into your last name.’”

Long before her world was rocked by the news, Nix knew she was born to work in fashion. She felt innately connected to it from the time she was able to dress herself—a cosmic tie to her half-siblings, who she wouldn’t learn about until she was already enrolled at Parsons. She remembers wearing purple lipstick and eyeshadow on the playground, and sitting next to the dad she grew up with on stage at the Baptist church, where he was the drummer in the band, playing dress-up GirlsGoGames on her iPad. She was barely a teenager when Gigi and Bella burst onto the modeling scene, effectively changing the game as part of the new generation of social media-savvy “Instagirls” who disrupted the traditional trajectory of the supermodels who came before them. She has the sort of insider access most industry hopefuls could only dream of, but she’s apprehensive about using it, trusting instead that she can make a name for herself on her own.

“My mom dressed me in all Gymboree, like I was out of a catalog,” Nix says of her first fascination with clothes. “I loved my little outfits, I was always in a matching shoe and a coat and a hat and a purse.” She calls her mother, a former model, “a picturesque version of a 2000s blonde hot mom,” and her first true style inspiration. “She was always in a capri [pant] and a tank top, and a wedge heel or a flip-flop.” Her dad also had a very distinct aesthetic: Christian rock chic. “He had his five buttons unbuttoned on a shirt, a huge cross necklace, big silver jewelry…We were like a white Southern family, but a little bit edgy.”

Nix grew up in Windermere, a small town outside of Orlando. She spent her high school years doing typical Central Florida activities: hanging out at Disney World and the surrounding amusement parks, smoking Backwoods, boating on the Butler Chain of Lakes, working at a Domino’s Pizza, driving around with her friends blasting Kodak Black and HOTBOII. “We were really leaning into the Floridian stereotypes—you either go Hot Cheeto Girl or you go Country Southern, and we definitely went Hot Cheeto Girl,” she jokes. “I had a high ponytail, gold hoops, and Anastasia huge, huge thick eyebrows.” She was outspoken and “had a temper,” but was a hippie at heart, protesting politics with her classmates—another trait she shares with her half-siblings who are vocal about their Palestinian heritage, despite it not being “brand safe.”

Nix’s school uniform kept her from experimenting with style most days, but as a self-proclaimed “Tyler, the Creator girl,” she would spice up her polos and khaki skirts with candy-colored Golf le Fleurs. Her fashion education started in earnest by flipping through her mom’s issues of Vogue and Cosmopolitan, moving to Tumblr in middle school, where she discovered dip-dyed hair and American Apparel tennis skirts. She loved going to vintage stores with her dad, and remembers the first thing she ever thrifted: super high-waisted, acid-wash shorts from the ‘80s, which she still has today. “I’ve always wanted to time travel,” she says of how different generations of fashion continue to inspire her. “I went through a big ‘70s phase in college, I was always in a bell bottom. It was shocking. I think I just wanted to be like Almost Famous, or like Dazed and Confused, they felt true to me.”

Many decisions in her life were made based upon cute outfit potential. It’s why she loved to watch America’s Next Top Model, Project Runway, and Toddlers & Tiaras; it’s why she took up tennis and cheerleading, despite being “the least athletic person alive.” Though her mom was a model, it wasn’t something she saw herself doing professionally. “I was always told by people I was too short, or didn’t have the proportions, which is maybe valid, but it squashed my dream a little bit when I was really young,” she remembers. “I wrote somewhere that I wanted to be a Victoria's Secret Angel at some point, which I thought was funny looking back now”—another prescient tie to her half-siblings.

Going to fashion school was the logical choice, something she’d written about her diary as a kid. It wasn’t until she lost Terry that she felt empowered to follow her dream, to live her life, to not stay stuck in grief. “He had always really wanted to go into music in a bigger way than he had—he was a rock’n’roll memorabilia guy, and he had a small music production studio in Orlando,” she recounts. “I don't really feel like he made money from it, it was more of a passion project, but he loved it, and I know he always really wanted to further pursue it. I was like, ‘I feel like I should just go do it, and see if I can.’”

Nix graduated last May into a fashion industry that’s perhaps more unstable than ever; Gen Z employment numbers are historically abysmal, making young job seekers’ economic prospects bleak, no matter the field they’re entering. “I've gone through really busy times after college, between assisting, traveling, or doing whatever,” she says. “Then months of unemployment — not a peep from any of the stylists that I work for, not a peep from anybody else, applying for more corporate jobs.” As she was figuring out the best way to navigate her post-grad period of uncertainty, her family business became tabloid fodder. “It was a very weird and disassociative time. I had already lost my dad, and with graduating, it was a lot to deal with,” she recalls. “I just tried really hard to stay grounded and think about, ‘What impression do I want to leave? How would I want to be treated if that were me?’ I think that's really where I've tried to lead with it all.”

Getting to know her family in the years since she took the DNA test has been a blessing, and she’s been welcomed with open arms. “The way that I was treated was really, really refreshing and nice—especially Gigi, Bella, and Anwar—they've all been so kind and caring, checking in on me about things about how I'm feeling,” she says. The news breaking was admittedly a relief, as she was overwhelmed by fear of accidentally leaking it herself.

“I was refreshing Deuxmoi for years, literally, just in case somebody had overheard me talking about something completely innocently,” she recalls. “I was so scared to talk about it, I wouldn't use their names fully. I was so fucking paranoid.” Figuring out who to trust is tricky in your teens and twenties, even when you’re not harboring a potentially life-altering piece of information. “I would confide in a friend about this huge thing that just happened to me, and then I would hear that other people at school knew about it,” she explains. “My hometown knew about it before anyone else did, probably over a year before it ever hit the newsstands, or whatever. I hadn't told that many people.”

Gossip has its way of getting around, and when it made its way to the press, Nix was on a Greek cruise with her family. She got a heads-up from one of her half-sisters about an hour before the story dropped; the rest of her day was spent freaking out, glued to her phone, reading the comments in the Daily Mail. “The words that were being used, I'd never seen in a sentence before… it was unreal,” she says with a laugh.

The levity with which she recounts one of the most traumatic days of her life came with time, but in the moment, it felt like the end of the world. “There is a liberation to it, and I've gotten so many amazing things out of it—like, I can openly talk about how much I adore them, and not be the one to break that news. I was so worried for so long that something I would say or do would ‘out’ them or something. Having that taken out of my hands was a blessing in disguise.”

Some time after publication, she went to a dinner party in New York at the tail end of a 14-hour-long day of assisting on set, with her kit still on. There, she ended up meeting a person who worked at the Daily Mail—and, as she came to find out after a couple of glasses of wine, on the story. “He immediately goes, 'I am so sorry,’ and I was like, 'Yeah, I bet you are!’”

As a peace offering, he told Nix he could help her find out who gave them the tip; she declined. “I genuinely don't know if I want to know,” she says. Having to contend with the possibility that it was someone she knows—and that this person potentially was paid—is too scary of a thought for her to bear.

She’s quick to say that the article and its aftermath offered her some opportunities that have eased the transition into the real world. Gigi introduced her to the stylist Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, who Nix assisted consistently for the first few months after graduation. “I've learned so much from her, probably more than I have through Parsons ever, to be honest,” she admits. “We met through her sisters but there was nothing about offering her the gig that had to do with our personal connection,” Karefa-Johnson says of Nix. “I remember in our first interview, I asked her, ‘You know this is mostly nonstop, hard manual labor right?’ She said she could hack it!” Nix volunteered even when there wasn’t room for her in the budget, and Karefa-Johnson says her good vibes were an asset, especially when the days were long and tense: “Aydan knew she was going to be getting down and dirty with grunt work and she showed up with a smile every day. The girl is hungry and eager to learn.”

She also booked her first runway gig, closing the Desigual show in Barcelona last September — the very same runway that both Gigi and Bella made their debuts on, in 2014 and 2015, respectively. “I was scared shitless, and the whole thing was, honestly, me standing up to my fear of just, like, being perceived,” says Nix. “I have a weird fear of embarrassing myself constantly, and so I just had to look that right in the face. I just decided, ‘I'm going to do this, I have to do it.’ I reached out to Gigi, she gave me some pointers and she gave me her blessing, which was also really helpful, because I don't want it to seem like I'm riding on the coattails of someone else.”

Nix is very protective of her relationship with her half-siblings, and takes great care to make sure it doesn’t cross over into territory that feels transactional, especially when it comes to her work and finding her way in fashion. “There is no judgment from me about anybody who uses who they know to get anywhere, I think that that's just life,” she says. “I get nervous because I am so new in the family. I know that there's a way to get my [TikTok] views up. I could easily go on there and do a storytime, ‘How I found out…’ I don't really feel like that's where I want to go with this. I don’t want to feel like a clout chaser. I want to be proud of the things that I'm doing, and how I've progressed in my career, and I want them to feel true to me.”

As for what comes next, Nix is open to more modeling, as well as any industry opportunities the universe presents to her. “I really love styling. I want to keep doing that and assisting, but I’ve also never been to an actual fashion show, except the one that I walked,” she says. “Being able to do stuff like that. I've always wanted to write more, I definitely want to model more. I think I've found that I actually enjoy it a lot more than I thought I would.” In the short term, she has plans to open her own vintage store, starting it online first before self-funding a physical retail space. “The number one way I can get paid for shopping,” she laughs.

One slightly complicating factor for Nix is that she is admittedly “terrible” at social media, which could pose a challenge for a newcomer trying to make it in the fashion industry. “I think I'm better at Instagram; I don't think I'm very good at TikTok, I don't really know how to be an influencer,” she says. Nix is aware that’s the route people and brands expect her to take, and that sitting it out altogether could put her at a disadvantage when it comes to getting jobs, but she’d prefer to focus her energy elsewhere. Karefa-Johnson admires how authentically she’s approaching her career path. “There’s an almost algorithmic hack to making it in fashion in this social media-dominating era, so I really commend her for valuing apprenticeship enough to take the windy road to the top,” she says.

More importantly than anything else, as her profile rises, she wants to do things on her own terms. “I really want to make sure that everything that I do is informed by my character and what I care about,” she explains. “I would never work for a brand that doesn't align with my political views. I have very strong opinions.” She knows her peers are losing jobs for speaking up about topics like Palestine or ICE. “Those aren't always marketable, but I don't know that I care enough to censor myself for a brand.”

Though Nix and Gen Z are starting their professional lives at a particularly difficult moment, they have the advantage of having their third eyes wide open. They know work won’t save them, and the system sets them up to fail. All they have is their integrity; they can see right through brands and creators who stay silent about the issues that matter. “You should be aligning with people and brands that align [with you], and maybe they don't align with everybody, and I get it,” she says. “I have a hard time even going on TikTok or Instagram anymore—everything is an ad, and I think eventually people are gonna get sick of that.”

If Nix has learned anything, it’s to trust her instincts. Sometimes the stars will align in mysterious ways.

Alyssa Vingan is a writer, editor, and host of The New Garde, a podcast and newsletter about the future of the fashion and beauty industries.