Malik received the baby. “It didn’t even click that she was gone,” said Gigi, staring forward through Dallas’s watchful ears as we slog through the top fields of Harmony Hollow, the farm of Yolanda’s friend, Joseph Jingoli, a construction company CEO. ‘I was so exhausted, and I looked up and he held her. It was adorable. “
Wearing a cropped North Face puffer, stretchy Zara jeans and threadbare black riding boots, she doesn’t look like a tormented ten-week-old mom, nor a paparazzi-stooping supermodel. With her hair tied into a sleek bun, a bare face, and tiny gold earrings, she looks especially like her teenage self, a rider who jumped competitively growing up in her hometown of Santa Barbara, California.
“What I really wanted from my experience was to feel like, okay, this is a natural thing that women should do.” She planned to give birth in a hospital in New York City, but then the reality of COVID hit – particularly the sequestration here, 90 minutes from Manhattan, and the number restriction in the delivery room, leaving Yolanda and Bella absent. would have been. Then she and Malik watched the 2008 documentary Being born, who is critical of medical interventions and describes a successful home birth. “We both looked at each other and were like, I think that’s the call,” says Gigi.
They placed an inflatable bath in their bedroom and sent their three cats and border collie away when the midwife expressed concern that the sphynx and Maine coon felines would pierce the tub with their claws. Malik asked Gigi what music she wanted to hear, and she surprised him by asking for the audio of a favorite children’s novel, The Indian in the closet. He downloaded the movie because it was also one of his favorites, and they spent the early hours of their work together to watch it. “We’d never talked about that before, but that’s when we discovered that we both loved it,” says Gigi shyly. She then tells me that Malik, the former One Direction star turned solo artist, and who is famous for being press shy (Gigi’s publicist declined to interview on his behalf), compared his own experience of her birth to a lion documentary he had seen in which a male lion nervously paces outside the cave while the lioness delivers her cubs. “Z was like, ‘That’s how I felt! You feel so helpless to see the person you love hurt. ”
Full spectrum
“In high school I used Xerox Steven Meisel’s pictures and colored them in with pencil. When I was asked to write a cover story for Vogue’s creativity problem, I thought back to that first creative output. It was a way to play with the idea of fantasy in fashion, ”says Ethan James Green of his inspiration for this digital cover.
Gigi’s Zoom doula, Malibu High classmate Carson Meyer, had prepared her for the moment when the mother feels she can no longer go without drugs. “I had to dig deep,” says Gigi. ‘I knew it was going to be the craziest pain in my life, but you have to surrender to it and say,’ This is what it is’. I thought that was great. “Yolanda and the midwife guided Gigi through the pain.” There was definitely a point where I thought, I wonder what it would be like with an epidural, how it would be different, “Gigi says honestly.” My midwife looked at me and said, “You’re doing it. No one can help you. You’re already past the epidural point anyway, so you’d be pushing in a hospital bed exactly the same way.” So she kept pushing.