Gigi Hadid is a vision in Prada on the March cover of Vogue, where the supermodel, 25, sat down for her first in-depth interview since she welcomed her first child with boyfriend Zayn Malik in September. Gigi, who shot the cover just 10 weeks after she gave birth naturally to her daughter, Khai, has a newfound confidence after becoming a mom — and she’s comfortable in the skin she’s in.
“I know that I’m not as small as I was before, but I also am a very realistic thinker,” she said of her post-baby body when she got the call to shoot the cover of Vogue‘s latest issue. “I straight up was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll shoot a Vogue cover, but I’m obviously not going to be a size 0,’ nor do I, at this point, feel like I need to be back to that,” she said. “I also think it’s a blessing of this time in fashion that anyone who says that I have to be that can suck it.” — And, that’s what we like to call a ‘mic drop.’
The new mom went on to explain that she had to “dig deep” to cope with the pain of her 14-hour labor. Gigi had a natural birth at her mother, Yolanda Hadid‘s home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where the model spent most of her pregnancy. “I had to dig deep. I knew it was going to be the craziest pain in my life, but you have to surrender to it and be like, ‘This is what it is,'” she recalled, admitting, “I loved that.”
Of her natural birth, Gigi recalled, “There definitely was a point where I was like, I wonder what it would be like with an epidural, how it would be different. My midwife looked at me and was like, ‘You’re doing it. No one can help you. You’re past the point of the epidural anyway, so you’d be pushing exactly the same way in a hospital bed.’”
While discussing her take on “instant maternal instincts,” she later added, “When you see someone do that [childbirth], you look at them a bit differently. I probably looked crazy, actually,” Gigi said, admitting, “I was an animal woman.”
Yolanda shared a brief quote in the interview and gushed over her daughter’s new role as a mom. “I’m proud of her face on a magazine, but seeing her give birth was a whole other level of proud,” the author said, explaining, “You go from looking at her as a daughter to looking at her as a fellow mother.”
Gigi added that while her mother and Zayn “were proud of me,” during Khai’s birth, there were “certain points I saw each of them in terror. Afterward, Z and I looked at each other and were like, ‘We can have some time before we do that again,'” she said.
