Gigi (a prolific home cook herself) made Banoffee pie and baked Yolanda’s favorite tarte tatin.

“We’re still close by,” says Gigi, “but we have our space to be our own little family.” She hosted Thanksgiving dinner for the first time this year, with Zayn’s mother, cooking the turkey. It is a family happily in flux: On the sprawling 32-acre property, the handful of cottages are designated for different siblings, but this summer, when Gigi moved out of her cottage into Zayn’s house, Bella and brother Anwar graduated to larger cottages, leaving the smallest as a guesthouse. THE NATURAL TRANSITIONS AND generational shifts of new motherhood are at play in the Hadid household. “You go from looking at her as a daughter to looking at her as a fellow mother.” “I’m proud of her face on a magazine, but seeing her give birth was a whole other level of proud,” Yolanda says. “She decided to completely take care of the baby alone,” says Yolanda, awed, “and I think that bond is so important.” The Dutch former model turned Real Housewives of Beverly Hills alum was my welcoming party when I arrived at the farm, booming “Hello!,” her arms wide on the threshold, in a camo-print puffer and Ugg boots. You’re past the point of the epidural anyway, so you’d be pushing exactly the same way in a hospital bed.’” So she kept pushing. “My midwife looked at me and was like, ‘You’re doing it. “There definitely was a point where I was like, I wonder what it would be like with an epidural, how it would be different,” Gigi says frankly. “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.’ I loved that.” Yolanda and the midwife coached Gigi through the pain.

Gigi’s Zoom doula, Malibu High classmate Carson Meyer, had prepared her for the moment where the mother feels she can’t go any longer without drugs. It was a way to play with the idea of fantasy in fashion,” says Ethan James Green of his inspiration for this digital cover. When asked to do a cover story for Vogue’s creativity issue, I thought back to that first creative output. “In high school I used to Xerox Steven Meisel’s pictures and color them in with pencil. “Z was like, ‘That’s how I felt! You feel so helpless to see the person you love in pain.’”

She then tells me that Malik, the former One Direction star turned solo artist, who is famously press-shy (Gigi’s publicist declined on his behalf to an interview), likened his own experience of her birth to a lion documentary he’d seen in which a male lion paces nervously outside the cave while the lioness delivers her cubs. “That’s something we’d never talked about but in that moment we discovered we both loved,” Gigi says bashfully. He downloaded the film because it was one of his favorites too, and they spent the early hours of labor watching it together. Malik asked Gigi what music she wanted to hear, and she surprised him by requesting the audio of a favorite children’s novel, The Indian in the Cupboard. They placed a blow-up 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 might puncture the tub with their claws.

Gigi hadid and zayn malik 2021