How fashion model Hailey Baldwin made a name for herself

Written by Elizabeth Elkin, CNNEmily Smith, CNN

Hailey Baldwin grew up surrounded by stardom, but she can rightly make her own claims to fame.

The 21-year-old fashion model has walked on runways for the likes of Tommy Hilfiger, Dolce and Gabbana and Moschino. She's a social media star with more than 12 million Instagram followers. And now, she's engaged to singer Justin Bieber.

Despite Baldwin's family fame, her father, actor Stephen Baldwin, kept her out of the spotlight as a child. In an interview with The Times of London she claimed to have had an average childhood in Nyack, New York. She told ES Magazine in 2016 that she'd like to raise her own children in a similar environment.

"When I have kids, they will not grow up around all this," she said. "It's so easy to become spoiled and pretentious and to have the wrong attitude. You have money and access to things the average person doesn't, and you're constantly surrounded by people trying to kiss your a**."

Hailey Baldwin at The Bowery Hotel in New York in 2018 Credit: Sean Zanni/Getty Images North America/Getty Images for McDonald's

Baldwin grew up on set with her father and was home-schooled. She went to ballet school until her late teens, when an injury halted her dance career.

"As a child who was all over the place and bouncing off the walls, doing ballet for 12 years taught me to be disciplined, and my job now forces me to be disciplined," she told the Times of London. "You have to keep it together or you fail."

Although raised religious, Baldwin said in the same interview that she's "definitely not the poster child for Christianity." She and Bieber are both members of Hillsong Church, a Pentecostal church known for its celebrity followers.

Baldwin has also gone on record about the personal struggles experienced since skyrocketing to Instagram fame.

"This generation has a lot of eyes on them," she said in her ES Magazine interview. "Everybody my age struggles with insecurities, so take that and multiply it by 7 million people. There are people much older than me saying horrible things, who have no business paying attention to what a 19-year-old does.

"It's not the best feeling in the world. But it comes with the job, so you just have to accept it and move on."

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Yet, despite her success on social media, Baldwin doesn't consider herself as simply an Instagram model, she told ELLE UK.

"I work my a** off to make what I have and to prove that this is what I want to do," she is quoted as saying. "I want to be a model. I don't think I would be where I am if people didn't see something in me. I put all my modeling (photos) on my Instagram because I'm showing it to people.

"It's not about me getting paid to model for things on Instagram -- of course, sometimes we do get paid for things we do for Instagram and Twitter -- but there is a line of calling someone an Insta model or an Insta star."

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