Gigi Hadid gave Vogue an inside look at what her life is like these days as a model and mother to her and ex Zayn Malik’s 4-year-old daughter Khai. For the first time in over a year, she discussed her and Malik’s relationship for the outlet’s April cover story. The couple dated on and off for six years before ultimately parting ways in October 2021. They welcomed Khai in September 2020.
She touched on their co-parenting schedule, saying, “Zayn and I do our custody schedules months in advance. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t change here and there, but we help each other out and have each other’s backs.”
This new stage of their relationship is one marked with “love, and a feeling of camaraderie,” she said.
The model acknowledged that the public interest in them would always be present, given that they are both celebrities. (Malik, of course, is a musician and former One Direction member.) “There is the hard part of the world knowing this much, and thinking they know everything,” she admitted. “And at the end of the day, we’re not interested in giving everyone our whole story. What we are interested in is raising our daughter together, with so much respect for each other, and not just as co-parents, but what we’ve been through together.”
The pair is raising Khai in rural Pennsylvania, where “Khai is protected by our friendships here,” Hadid said, something “that means a lot to me.”
She believes that she and Khai are learning how to navigate life together in their own ways. “For a lot of moms there’s this perfect image of what they’re supposed to be and how it needs to go,” she said. But she and Khai “grow together. You wake up and do your best and you realize it is enough, and there’s a beauty in not necessarily knowing exactly how that’s going to go.”
The experience has taught her “a huge lesson that I needed” about life generally. It’s “probably one of the reasons that Khai came to me,” Hadid added. “You can’t always be in control. You can’t always plan. You can look at an experience as the right or wrong time for anything, if that’s your perspective. Now I just give myself the grace and look at how many things I’ve handled. Step by step, I learned. I got through it.”
