Heidi Klum Turns Herself Into a Severed Hand for Halloween No. 25

Heidi Klum arrived at her 25th-anniversary Halloween party on Saturday as her own severed left hand. The 53-year-old model and "Project Runway" host spent roughly six hours transforming into the eight-foot appendage. Anniversary milestones, it seems, call for limbs.

Klum has said she aims to be "the most" with each year's costume, and she has a track record to defend. In 2023 she went as a giant peacock, flanked by Cirque du Soleil acrobats. Last year she chose Medusa, wearing animatronic snakes and a reptile suit. This year's category, by her own framing, was "most gory" — and a detached hand delivers that verdict efficiently.

Who built the hand?

Hollywood prosthetics designer Mike Marino, Klum's longtime collaborator, created the costume. The build ran to a materials list that reads like a special-effects invoice: foam, latex, metal, nylon, plastic, silicone and spandex. Six hours of preparation turned that inventory into a wearable eight-foot hand, with Klum presumably occupying the palm.

The sheer engineering compares less to fashion than to a film-set creature effect — which is Marino's home turf.

What did Klum say on the carpet?

Posing for photos on the blue carpet, surrounded by half a dozen people in yellow hazmat suits, Klum supplied the backstory for her missing limb. "It just was one of those days. It was in the elevator, actually. The rest went down the chute," she said in an interview at the party.

The hazmat entourage suggests a crime-scene staging around the costume. The deadpan delivery is pure Klum: commit to the bit, explain the gore with a shrug. Elevators, viewers may conclude, are dangerous places for hands.

Why does the 25th anniversary matter?

Klum's annual party has run for a quarter of a century, making it one of the longest-running fixtures on the celebrity Halloween calendar. Each edition now carries the weight of her own "most" doctrine — most ostentatious, most petrifying, most gory — a competitive brief she sets for herself and, implicitly, for guests. The guest list this year included, among other efforts, a headless couple and figures evoking the ghosts of Versailles, per the party's reported theme of zany, ghoulish excess.

Twenty-five years in, the costume arms race shows no sign of de-escalation. Next year's category is presumably already under construction somewhere in Marino's workshop.