Gigi Hadid has revealed that her partner Zayn Malik caught their newborn daughter following a 14-hour labour at home.
The catwalk star, 25, welcomed Khai, her first child, in September at her family ranch in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, with Malik, her mother Yolanda, and her sister Bella by her side.
She told Vogue magazine that due to exhaustion she had been unaware she had given birth until she looked up to see former One Direction star Malik, 28, cradling their child after catching her.
“It didn’t even click that she was out. I was so exhausted, and I looked up and he’s holding her. It was so cute,” she said.
She added that she had felt like “an animal woman” during labour.
Hadid graces the cover of Vogue in a photoshoot done 10 weeks after welcoming Khai, whose name is from the Arabic for “the chosen one”.
She said: “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.’ I loved that.”
Recalling how her mother and a local midwife coached her through the pain, she added: “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.’
“I know my mom and Zayn and Bella were proud of me, but at 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’.”
Hadid also told of how shooting a Vogue cover 10 weeks after giving birth had not worried her.
“I know that I’m not as small as I was before, but I also am a very realistic thinker,” she said.
“I straight up was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll shoot a Vogue cover, but I’m obviously not going to be a size zero,’ nor do I, at this point, feel like I need to be back to that.
“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.”
Pop star Malik, who released the album Nobody Is Listening in January, announced he had become a father on social media in September.
He wrote: “To try to 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.”
Los Angeles-born Hadid and Bradford’s Malik have been dating on-and-off since late 2015.