Hands Down, Heidi Klum Becomes Her Own Hand at Cathédrale

Heidi Klum came to her 25th annual Halloween party on Saturday, October 31, as a giant, bloody severed hand modeled on her own left one, at Cathédrale in the Moxy East Village on East 11th Street.

Only her eyes and mouth showed. The rest of her was palm.

The wrist ended in dangling tendons. The fingers wore long red nails, a thumb ring, her engagement ring and her wedding band. Helpers in blood-spattered hazmat suits walked her in, CBS News reports.

Why a Hand?

Because she looked at hers. "Literally, my left hand inspired me," Klum told E! News on the red carpet. CBS reports the idea came to her a year ago, when she looked at her hand and thought she might fit her whole body inside it.

The copy is exact. The palm lines and veins are there. So is the green stone of her wedding ring and the tattoo on her ring finger that reads "Tom," which E! News reports she got on her wedding day.

Tom himself was not there. Her husband, the musician Tom Kaulitz, was on tour, according to CBS. "A little bit of Tom is with me," Klum said.

"Literally, my left hand inspired me."

The hints had been bloody for weeks. On the day itself she posted photos on Instagram of bloodied prosthetics going onto her face, CBS reports, which told her followers the face would survive and not much else. In September she told People the costume "goes very well with red wine" and was "very, very bloody," HollywoodLife reported, and before the party she posted a photo of nothing but prosthetic organs.

What Did It Take?

About six hours in the chair on Halloween itself, and months before that. Her team spent months on the prosthetics, E! reports, a job she summed up as "Many hands doing this hand." CBS puts the morning at five to six hours and says the build took far longer.

The worst part was the weight. "Hands down, the hardest thing is carrying it," Klum told CBS. "It's quite heavy."

Suite 646 lined up the prep numbers the outlets reported, and the comparison is ours. The table stays in the paragraph because this page has no tables.

Klum, 2026 hand, about six hours of makeup on the day, months of work by her team. Klum, 2025 Medusa, five months of work and about 15 people, by her own account to E!. James Charles, 2026 Yzma, seven and a half hours including prosthetics, per E!.

By that count a guest out-sat the host by about 90 minutes. The host still won the room.

Who Else Came?

A room full of famous faces, in character. E! counted Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka as the twins from The Shining, and Kyle MacLachlan, with his wife Desiree Gruber, as Cliff Vandercave from the 1994 Flintstones film, a costume he said was the original. Ice-T came as a burglar and Coco Austin as a cat burglar.

Taylor Momsen went as AC/DC's Angus Young. Questlove wore a San Francisco 49ers jersey with a bejeweled helmet. Karen Mulder came as Karl Lagerfeld in what E! describes as his own clothes and sunglasses. Chase Hudson came as Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, Valentina Sampaio as Poison Ivy and Mariah Strongin as Wonder Woman. The trainer David Kirsch went as an angel with silver abs. Andrew Rannells and Tuc Watkins were there, and so were three of Klum's children, Leni, Johan and Lou. Klum, who is 53, has four, according to E!.

Where Has the Party Been?

It moves. Last year Klum held her 24th party at the Hard Rock Hotel New York and came as Medusa, CBS reported in 2025. In 2022 she arrived on the end of a fishing line as a worm, the costume that went viral. CBS also lists a peacock, an eight-foot Transformer, the werewolf from Michael Jackson's Thriller video, a crowd of Klum clones and Kali, the many-armed Hindu goddess of death and destruction, among the years before.

This year the address was 112 East 11th Street, where Cathédrale serves French Mediterranean food off an open hearth in the Moxy East Village. The party was presented by Apothic and Butterfinger, according to CBS and E!.

The same night, the Village Halloween Parade took Sixth Avenue, and we wrote about the theme it picked this year. A day earlier the TODAY anchors dressed up NBC's history at Rockefeller Plaza.

Twenty-five Halloweens in, Klum has played a worm, a goddess and a gorgon. This year she gave the city a hand.