![]() ![]() Raised by a dinner-lady mum, Trisha, who converted to Islam, and stay-at-home dad, Yaser, he was eight the year of the Bradford race riots in 2001. His life has, in many ways, been a bellwether for modern Britain. ![]() He’s talked about eating disorders (movingly, he says it was about being able to control one thing in the madness of the pop years) and the occasionally crippling anxiety that means it is only now that he can contemplate going on tour by himself. If mental health is now an acceptable zone for celebrity interviews, Zayn can take some of the credit. Yet no other member of the band has defined public discourse more than this Muslim-raised, mixed race working-class boy from West Yorkshire. Because he was marketed as “the mysterious one”, Zayn is rarely given his due for speaking out on tough subjects. Read more: Zayn Has Never Looked Hotter Than In His New Music Video “It helps that she can get things together for me a little bit. “She’s super-organised and I’m really not,” he says gratefully at one point. His eyes positively swim with love every time her name is mentioned. “Everything is great,” he says of their relationship, which weathered a brief, if very public, split and reconciliation earlier this year (side note: are Instagram break-ups ever really break-ups?). Fashion week rages away in the city below, so his girlfriend Gigi Hadid pops in between catwalk commitments to cuddle and watch cooking programmes. “No” is still “nurr”, his best friend is his cousin, he loves his mum and, between visits to the recording studio, lives in semi-isolation getting lightly buzzed and playing Fortnite. As we sit in the rain drinking lagers, it becomes apparent that beyond the intense razzmatazz of his extraordinary facial symmetry is a quiet, thoughtful twentysomething man from the north of England, with flat Yorkshire vowels undiluted by fame. But he loves the view and has a young person’s pride in his fabulous property investment. “I’m domestic,” he says, dispatching his assistant to find some towels, because he wants to hang out on his roof in thick New York drizzle with only a fluoro-orange Air Jordan hoodie for protection. He also became an international figurehead for biracial success and anti-Islamophobia. He moved to the States, clocked up billions of streams, dueted with Taylor Swift, shot campaigns for Versus and endured the peculiar menace of having a dozen paparazzi camped outside his door every day. For a brief moment, Zayn was the YouTube generation’s answer to John Lennon (or Geri Halliwell, at least), devastating millions of fans across the globe with his shotgun exit, then thrilling them a year later with a record-breaking, Billboard-topping debut album. That was a year after he fled One Direction, in March 2015, when the world’s most successful group was at the hormone-addled apex of its fame. Though, as per his instructions, I must dutifully point out that it’s a simple “Zayn” these days, ever since the 25-year-old boyband survivor from Bradford with perfect hair and poptastic falsetto dispensed with his surname and went fully Cher. Then, luckily for us all, I stumbled upon a little tweet from a guy who claims to have cast the young woman in question in the video, and it was my first clue.Welcome to the wonderful – if somewhat half-baked – world of Zayn Malik. There were no articles about her, no credit listed on the "Pillowtalk" video. ![]() It turned out to be a bigger job than I realized, because even my good friend the Internet, upon whom I can usually rely in hard times, didn't seem to know who she was. (And also if she can teach me some beauty secrets, because, spike-faced girl, you are glowing.) But vadge bouquets aside, who is that woman? I've never seen her before, as far as I remember, and now I will stop at nothing to figure out who she is and if she's done anything else I should be aware of. I don't know about you, but, after my first viewing of the new single, all I could think to myself was, who is the woman in "Pillowtalk?" I'm sure I was supposed to be watching Zayn Malik and real-life girlfriend Gigi Hadid explore each other's mouths with their tongues, but I found it pretty hard to tear my eyes away from this mysterious newcomer with the spikes bursting out of her face and the. ![]()
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