Heidi Klum has explained why her latest Halloween creation is her most personal yet.
The model and TV host, 51, revealed on Saturday at her 25th annual party in New York City that her giant severed hand costume was built as a scaled-up replica of her own left hand. The prosthetic featured her actual palm lines, her real manicure, and an oversized version of her green-stone engagement ring and wedding band on the ring finger.
Beside the rings, positioned exactly as on her real hand, the name “Tom” was tattooed onto the prosthetic finger in tribute to her husband, Tom Kaulitz, matching the ink she got on their wedding day. The detail transformed what might have been a standard horror prop into an intimate self-portrait blown up to body size, with Klum’s own face peeking out from below the bloody wrist.
“I looked at my hand and I was thinking, ‘How can I fit my body into this hand?'” she said. “Boom, it could have been left hand, right hand.”
She went with the left. The costume took five months to build and required six hours to get into on the day of the event, according to VT.
Prosthetic makeup designer Mike Marino, who won an Emmy this year for his work on “The Penguin,” designed and built the piece. Marino has collaborated with Klum on several of her annual costumes, but he indicated this one represented a new peak in complexity.
“This costume this year is one of the most elaborate costumes ever made,” he said.
Every surface was hand-painted, from the veins beneath the skin to the knuckle creases and the cuticles around the long red nails. The wrist terminated in a mix of tissue, bone and severed tendons designed to appear freshly cut from a body.
“Everything is hand-painted,” Klum said, adding: “Many hands doing this hand.”
The physical toll of wearing it surpassed anything she had previously attempted. Klum told reporters on the blue carpet that the weight was substantial and that maneuvering in the costume presented unprecedented difficulties.
“Hands down, the hardest thing is carrying it,” she said.
The party took place at Cathédrale Restaurant at Moxy East Village in Manhattan. Over a quarter century, Klum’s annual event has become one of New York’s biggest celebrity gatherings, with the self-proclaimed Queen of Halloween having previously appeared as a worm, E.T., Medusa, a peacock, Princess Fiona from “Shrek,” Jessica Rabbit, a butterfly and a humanoid alien hybrid with exposed rubber intestines. Kaulitz has matched her each year, appearing as a fisherman, a stone knight and various other characters.
Klum’s 25th annual party continues a tradition that has drawn increasing attention for its escalating ambition, with guests’ looks growing more extreme each year. The 2026 edition maintained that trajectory through its fusion of grotesque imagery and deeply personal symbolism, the severed hand serving simultaneously as horror spectacle and matrimonial tribute.