It’s been seven months since Gigi Hadid and boyfriend Zayn Malik welcomed their baby girl Khai. And the first-time mom is getting candid about how they’ll teach their daughter to “be a bridge for her different ethnicities.”
Gigi’s mom, Yolanda, is Dutch-American, while her dad, Mohammed, is Palestinian. Zayn’s dad, Yaser, is British Pakistani while his mom, Trisha, is of English and Irish descent. In her cover story interview for i-D Magazine, the model reflected on her own experiences growing up.
“We [Zayn and I] think about it and talk about it a lot as partners and it’s something that’s really important to us, but it’s also something that we first experienced ourselves,” she started. “Because both of our parents are their own heritage. We are that first generation of those mixed races, and then that comes with that first generational experience of being like, ‘Oh damn, I’m the bridge!’. That’s not something that my parents experienced or that they can really help me through. It’s something I’ve always thought about my whole life.”
“In certain situations, I feel–or I’m made to feel–that I’m too white to stand up for part of my Arab heritage,” Gigi continued. “You go through life trying to figure out where you fit in racially. Is what I am, or what I have, enough to do what I feel is right? But then, also, is that taking advantage of the privilege of having the whiteness within me, right? Am I allowed to speak for this side of me, or is that speaking on something that I don’t experience enough to know? Do you know what I’m saying?”
“I think that Khai will grow up feeling out the way that she can or wants to be a bridge for her different ethnicities,” Gigi said. “But I think that it will be nice to be able to have those conversations, and see where she comes from [with] it, without us putting that onto her. What comes from her is what I’m most excited about, and being able to add to that or answer her questions, you know?”
Gigi had spent most of last year – and her pregnancy – on her mom’s farm in Pennsylvania. But before the pandemic hit, she’d been walking runways during fashion week. And she got candid about her pregnancy journey with the magazine as well.
“[It was] super strange. It obviously felt weird during fashion month when I secretly felt so sick at work but you can’t take a sick day during fashion week!” she admits. “I just had to pretend it wasn’t happening. Or, you know, we had a birthday party and someone would offer me a drink, and I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m not drinking this month’ or whatever. And as everyone started to get tipsy, I would sneak out.”
“There’s a bittersweetness because I know that obviously COVID-19 has been such a tragedy for so many people and families, and lives, and jobs,” she continues. “But there was a silver lining in the timing, in that I got to experience pregnancy and giving birth and being with my baby, and it was a reset that I would have had to make for myself, regardless. It really gave me time to experience motherhood the way I wanted to, which was without a baby nurse and without a nanny for as long as I could before I went back to work.”
Gigi and Zayn announced that their baby girl arrived earthside in September of last year. Sharing an adorable post of Khai’s tiny baby hand clutched around her dad’s much larger one, he captioned it, “Our baby girl is here, healthy and beautiful🙏🏽❤️ to try put into words how i am feeling right now would be an impossible task. The love I feel for this tiny human is beyond my understanding. Grateful to know her, proud to call her mine, and thankful for the life we will have together x”
In March, he got candid about his and Gigi’s transition into parenthood.
“Honestly, it’s amazing. A lot of people that I was speaking to obviously before she was born and stuff were like, you know, it’s a big adjustment and it’s going to be a massive change and stuff, but honestly, she’s an amazing baby. It’s been really easy for me and Gig to kind of just ease into it,” he shared on iHeartRadio’s Valentine in the Morning.
“She’s made it really easy for us, she sleeps really well and she loves her milk. It’s just feeding and changing diapers at the moment,” he continued. “It’s wicked, I’m enjoying it for sure.”
“I didn’t expect to be quite as into it, to be honest with you. I was always into myself, just doing my own thing of just writing, recording, making music, and I was just very focused on my career. I had time for my relationship too, but it was still solely about me,” he said. “The fact that [Khai] has been so easy to kind of just adjust to, it’s been surprising to me because I just love spending my days with her, hanging out with her, and just doing really relaxing and chill stuff with her.”
“I’m watching kids’ shows with her on TV and on Netflix, learning nursery rhymes, rolling around with her, and just singing to her. It’s a really different pace of life, but it’s been really easy to adjust and that’s the most surprising,” he said. Asked what he sings to his daughter, he explained, “I kind of make stuff up, to be honest…it’s mainly melodies and she kind of makes sounds back to me, which is amazing. It’s not necessarily a specific song, I just like singing to her. It’s pretty cool.”
