HEIDI KLUM
The supermodel talks about family, career, fashion, oh yes, and love
‘So, what do you want me to wear?’ Heidi Klum is standing in front of me, hands on hips and, apart from a thong, naked. It’s not the nudity that surprises me – after 29 years in the modelling industry, I’m sure German-born Klum is far more comfortable to be sans clothes than us prudish Brits will ever be. No, it’s the question. We are standing in front of a rail of dresses, usually the slightly agonising moment on a shoot when the celebrity flicks through the clothes, deciding which – if any – she feels inclined to try on. In fact, a member of the styling team on set lets slip that another of their A-list clients regularly informs magazine teams she ‘isn’t feeling’ any of the multiple designer dresses brought along to a shoot, leaving them, I imagine, rather panic-stricken. But not Klum. She gamely tries on everything, twirls around and lets us decide which outfits look best. Most things look great, some things really great, but Klum doesn’t need any opinions sugar-coated. She seems remarkably devoid of ego and vanity – she just wants the best decision to be made. And quickly.
I soon realise that this is probably the secret to Klum’s success. She later muses on it. ‘There are so many choices out there. Do we always make the right ones? I don’t know. But I love to be in the present. I feel like we waste too much time endlessly looking back and it’s just not productive.’
Making bold choices sums up much of Klum’s career – and perhaps her romantic relationships, too. At 18, she won a modelling contest in Germany and two years later moved to New York. A Sports Illustrated cover followed in 1998, along with covers for Vogue, Elle and Harper’s Bazaar and a 13-year stint as a Victoria’s Secret ‘Angel’. She smiled a lot more than other models back then, and on reflection says, ‘It took people in fashion a long time to come around, because it was not cool to be happy when
I started.’ By 2004, her joie de vivre had landed her a judging spot on the fashion design TV show Project Runway and, by 2015, after Elle Macpherson parted ways with leading lingerie brand Bendon, she’d stepped into the role of designer and ambassador of its newly renamed, yet just as phenomenally successful, Heidi Klum Intimates collection. A clothing line with German supermarket chain Lidl, plus judging gigs at America’s Got Talent and Germany’s Next Topmodel, can also be added to the mix.
Her most recent venture, Making The Cut, is currently airing on Amazon Prime Video. In it, 12 hopeful fashion designers from around the globe battle it out to win $1m to invest in their own brand, plus launch an exclusive line for Amazon Fashion. Additionally, every week, one winning clothing design is manufactured and sold via Amazon. So why did Klum leave one style contest for another?
‘After the 16th season of Project Runway came to an end when the Weinstein company went down [at the time, the now-convicted producer Harvey Weinstein was facing multiple accusations of sexual misconduct] and then it was bought by someone else [the Bravo network],’ she explains. ‘Instead of saying, “Okay, where do I sign?” I realised I had the opportunity to venture out, be more creative, and make a change.’
Fellow judge and Klum’s ‘TV husband’ (her words) Tim Gunn jumped too and, as executive producers, they touted their new concept around the networks, settling on Amazon, because, as Klum says, ‘it’s a one-stop shop. You watch the show, you love that outfit, you can click it and go on immediately to the Making The Cut store to buy it.’ It’s a great idea, made even more watchable thanks to a ‘who’s who’ of guest judges, including Naomi Campbell, Nicole Richie and Carine Roitfeld.
‘IT WAS NOT COOL TO BE HAPPY WHEN I STARTED MODELLING’
Klum says it might sound hectic, but that’s how she likes it. ‘I think I would be probably a little bit bored if I was just doing one thing. I’m so used to juggling now. I love all the planning, the organising, all of it. When I was a model, my first French Vogue cover was a very big deal. At that time, Sports Illustrated was everything, too – everyone wanted to see who was on that cover. And then I got little TV parts and I loved all of these different things. Now I also love to entertain people; I like to put smiles on their faces so they leave their life for a minute and look at something else.’
I ask how she fits in all the various projects alongside parenting her four children (she has a daughter, Leni, 15, from her relationship with Italian businessman Flavio Briatore and sons Henry, 14, Johan, 13, and daughter Lou, 10, from her marriage to musician Seal) – I’ve read that her family’s morning schedule is executed with a military precision. ‘I do have amazing people who help me,’ she explains. ‘I was always mom and dad, both in one person – going to work, being at home, getting up. I get up every morning at 6am, because one of the kids has to be out the door by 6.50am in order to get to her school.’
She’s using the past tense here because she says domestic duties have become easier since her relationship with Tom Kaulitz, guitarist with German band Tokio Hotel, began. ‘Tom’s very helpful. He shares my correctness. We’re very like, “If I tell you that, that’s what I’m going to do.” And you can hold your breath that it’s going to happen.’
Her kids also share her enthusiasm for Kaulitz (apparently he’s currently teaching Leni to drive). ‘You see so many times that someone falls in love and then it doesn’t gel as well, so I’m so happy and grateful that everyone is happy with one another,’ says Klum. ‘That he is cool with my kids, my kids are cool with him.’ She adds that she thinks it helps that Kaulitz is young. ‘He’s a 30-year-old man, so there’s just a different life and spirit about him. He does music and his brother has neon-green hair. He has tattoos everywhere.’
In fact, their age difference (Kaulitz is 16 years her junior) has earned itself more column inches than anything else about their relationship. A German friend tells me their relationship is the equivalent of Kate Moss marrying a member of One Direction. But Klum says that honestly, she doesn’t notice it – except for when they’re in bed. ‘Sometimes in the morning when he’s laying next to me, I wish my eyesight was better than his. I can see far; close – not so good. So he’s always a bit fuzzy. Meanwhile he has really good eyesight. That’s the only thing that kind of sucks. I wish we had the opposite problem.’
That aside, what she has found with Kaulitz is a far deeper connection than she has ever had in a relationship before. ‘It just works. When we close our door and we’re at home, we just want to be with each other. It’s just like the core is the same. The values are the same. And I think it helps when you have a similar origin. Tom and I just love really German food – for example, potato balls, blaukraut – and sometimes, on Sundays, when they show certain traditional German folk music on the TV, we lie in bed and watch it. People wouldn’t understand it, but it’s just, it’s something that we grew up with.’
It’s kind of wonderful – and also fascinating – to see Klum most definitely in the honeymoon period of her relationship. On our shoot, she admires the vintage Airstream perched high on a Malibu hilltop, where we’re taking photos, and asks the owner whether she can rent it for Valentine’s Day. She then starts planning what she might cook for Kaulitz and even rocks from side to side against the walls of the caravan, to see how much ‘movement’ it can handle (once again, this is a lot for my British reserve!).
I can’t help but think about Demi Moore’s recent memoir, in which she reveals she felt
‘I’M SO GRATEFUL THAT TOM IS COOL WITH MY KIDS AND MY KIDS ARE COOL WITH HIM’
pressure to keep her younger husband interested sexually. But actually, I don’t think this is the case for Klum – this is just part of her character. In fact, the same candour comes out at lots of different points during our conversation, and every time it feels like a breath of fresh air. When I ask her how she manages to successfully co-parent her kids with Seal, now that they’re no longer together, she says, ‘We try as good as we can. There’s always a reason why you’re not with someone any more, you know? It’s not all rosy-rosy. It just isn’t. So sometimes it’s hard, but then you have to all come together as a family and sometimes everything is just like hopping on clouds. It’s just the way it is.’
She’s equally as honest about her relationship with her body. ‘I feel happy with who I am and how I am. If I wasn’t, I would change it. I wear the pants I want to wear and I live my life so I can. In the beginning, I had to [be disciplined about food] and now I’m just so used to it. There are so many choices, just pick the right things. Because then you don’t have the struggle.’
I get the sense this no-nonsense attitude was inherited from her mother, Erna, a former hairdresser. ‘My mom is someone who always tells me the truth. Or her truth,’ Klum reveals. ‘In the industry that I’m in, a lot of people tell me how great something is or how pretty I look. My mom, not. She will always be like, “I didn’t love when you did that or when you wore that. You could have done your hair differently.” And I always appreciate that.’ And although she professes not to be a ‘let’s-go-and-have-lunch-all-the-time kind of a girl’, Klum says she has an ever-growing group of friends to whom she turns for counsel, which now includes Mel B, after the pair worked together on America’s Got Talent. ‘Mel is also not really a girlie girl,’ she says. ‘She’s a tough, strong woman, which I love. She doesn’t mince her words and she’s just super-direct. That is my kind of girl.’ (Klum later mentions how she invited Mel for Thanksgiving last autumn and she arrived with a hoard of extra family members in tow, which didn’t seem to bother Klum in the least.)
It’s hard to know if, at 46, Klum has found a sense of balance in her life, or even if she needs to. She says she never reads or listens to podcasts (‘I don’t know how people find the time, to be honest with you’) and that even exercising to clear her head is out of the question because, ‘I get in this headspace where it overtakes so much, I have to do it all the time.’ Instead of yoga, which she describes as ‘too calm for me’, she says, ‘I’d rather have the music cranked up in our family room. Lights off, disco ball going and then, dance party.’
She’s not exactly a wild child, but says she’s trying to make up for lost time. ‘I was always a good girl when I was younger – going to bed early, getting up early, doing a lot of castings and trying to get jobs. Then I became a mother at 30 and entered a different phase of my life. But I feel like now I like to have more fun. If my husband says, “Hey, I’m going to pick you up from work, let’s go to dinner,” the old me probably would have been like, “Let’s go home and go to bed early,” but I have this amazing partner and it’s romantic, and he loves taking me out to places. I enjoy that more, instead of work, work, work. I feel like I’m at that place now, where I have a great personal life and a business life, and it’s fallen into place.’
She seems to have it all figured out, so it might be hard to believe that Klum ever feels fearful in life, but she assures me she still does – particularly in her career. ‘It’s kind of strange, because I’m confident, but I’m scared at the same time. It’s a thrill that you get, this adrenaline. I’m terrified of it, but I love it at the same time. Does that make sense? But I love my own achievement, that I went through it, afterwards. Maybe that’s what it is.’
Right now, Klum says her biggest challenge is being present. ‘Something that I’ve learned over the years is to be happier in the moment,’ she admits. ‘I want to experience and love and live more in that very day and make that beautiful instead of wishing it away. But I don’t look back. I live in the present and prepare for what’s to come.’ It’s a great philosophy – and it’s clearly working. Follow your heart, forget your ego and ditch the regrets. Maybe we should all be a little more Heidi.
‘I WAS ALWAYS A GOOD GIRL WHEN I WAS YOUNGER. NOW I LIKE TO HAVE MORE FUN’