

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.
