
Gigi Hadid returns to the annual Pirelli Calendar for a different role.
She, American Ballet Theater principal Misty Copeland, French model and actress Laetitia Casta, and Ozark star Julia Garner are four female stars who appear in the 2019 edition of the tire company's popular trade calendar. Behind-the-scenes images from the photo shoot were released on Thursday.
[Photographer] Albert Watson depicts the women as movie characters who have achieved their life goals or are on the road to achieving them. The photos showcase "the changing nature of ambition and success."
Hadid plays a rich and successful woman who, unbeknownst to others, harbors sadness and feels safe only inside her New York apartment, where she receives the comfort of her best friend and confidant, played by fashion designer Alexander Wang.
Hadid had also appeared in the Pirelli Calendar in 2015, wearing a sexy latex outfit.
In the 2019 calendar, Copeland plays a dancer who works as a stripper, while fellow American Ballet Theatre dancer Calvin Royal III plays her boyfriend.
Casta plays a painter who lives in a contemporary downtown loft with her boyfriend Sergei Polunin, a Ukrainian ballet dancer.
Garner plays a photographer who works in a botanical garden and dreams of becoming a portrait photographer. Model Astrid Eika also makes an appearance.
"I didn't want to take a bunch of models down to the beach and have them take their tops off," Albert Watson, the 75-year-old Scottish photographer behind the 2019 calendar, told the New York Times. "It seemed old-fashioned. I was more interested in telling the stories of four different women."
Marco Tronchetti Provera, the chief executive of Pirelli, told the newspaper that the calendar's purpose is "to mark the passing of time" by capturing the issues or obsessions that define it.
The 2019 Pirelli Calendar will be released this fall.