Other than a few social media hits — most notably revealing the name of her daughter — Gigi Hadid has been off The Scene since getting pregnant right as Covid hit. I have to think someone at Vogue did the math on the spot, and locked down the exclusive on her re-entry well in advance. We’ll get to the cover itself in the slideshow; the accompanying profile went to Chloe Malle, a contributing editor at Vogue who also happens to be the daughter of Candice Bergen — and the mother of Candice’s TRULY ADORABLE NOODLEMUFFIN of a grandson, LOOK AT THIS BABY — and the magazine gave her quite a few column inches to chronicle Gigi’s experiences with motherhood at the family compound in Pennsylvania. There are a lot of unexpected details, like the fact that Gigi drives a Chevy Silverado truck, that their property used to house circus animals, and that Dua Lipa gave Anwar Hadid a pair of goats for Christmas that were “not suited to New York City apartment life” and relocated to the family farm. (I desperately wish there had been a comment from his co-op board.) There are also a lot of details about her home birth, which was apparently both “peaceful” and also turned her into “an animal woman.” If you suspect a Vogue cover profile is not the place to turn for nuanced information on the pros and cons of home births, you are correct. I did enjoy this comment, though, about her return to modeling:
Most mothers 10 weeks postpartum are not called upon for a Vogue cover, but Gigi was unfazed. “I know that I’m not as small as I was before, but I also am a very realistic thinker. 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 says. “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.”
Obviously, her being Gigi Hadid — a huge celebrity with a huge following — may give her a unique freedom to say “suck it” that other models would lack. But I do appreciate that this is the only oxygen the article gives to the tired old idea of bouncing back, and that if the issue had to be raised, Gigi dismissed it with a flick of the hand: Her body is her body, she’s good with that, if you aren’t then that’s your problem, the end, moving on.
