Heidi Klum has done it again! Her 2026 Halloween costume is seriously bizarre

Most people choose a costume on the afternoon of the party. Heidi Klum begins hers months ahead, and she seems to treat the result as a competition with herself. This year, for the 25th edition of her New York Halloween bash, the 53-year-old model came as an oversized, dismembered hand.

The hand was a scaled-up copy of her own left one. Her face sat in the middle of the palm, framed by fleshy folds. Dagger-length crimson nails tipped the fingers, and a gory stump with exposed tissue marked where the wrist should have ended. Even the small details came from real life: the green stone ring and the “Tom” tattoo on one finger, a nod to her husband, Tom Kaulitz.

Klum didn’t stroll in on foot. She arrived in a truck plastered with red “DANGER” warnings, and a crew of actors in yellow hazmat suits lifted her out as if she were a biological threat being moved to a secure location.

The logistics were part of the show. Her legs were hidden inside the hand’s middle and ring fingers, and she threaded one arm into the thumb. On the red carpet, an assistant squirted liquid into her bloodied mouth with a syringe, which kept her hydrated and fit the gore theme.

The slow burn of a teaser campaign

Klum had been building suspense for weeks. On October 24 she posted an Instagram image captioned “What’s my costume?” with a countdown of one week to go. Fans studied it and guessed at brains, intestines and even sea creatures. She told People in September that the look was “very, very bloody” and would suit a glass of red wine. She also gave a sense of the prep work: she said everything has to be removed from her skin first, or the prosthetics won’t hold.

A look back at the queen’s greatest hits

Klum’s Halloween history reads like a catalogue of increasingly extreme ideas. She hosted her first party in 2000 and arrived in black leather, a goth look that was tame by her later standards. Over the years she has gone for glamour, as with her Jessica Rabbit, and for comedy, with her take on Princess Fiona from Shrek. Later years brought a series of full body transformations, including a worm, a peacock and an alien.

Last year she came as Medusa, in head-to-toe green with snakes writhing from her scalp. She told E! that everything on the costume was hand-painted, with about 15 people working on it. She also admitted that by the end of the night she wanted the snakes gone, and she said she had wanted to leave her own party early. This year’s costume suggests the discomfort hasn’t put her off.

Klum’s costumes succeed because she commits fully. She wears hours of prosthetics, stages a theatrical arrival, and treats the transformation as performance art. Twenty-five years in, the Halloween party has become the most closely watched event of her calendar, and a severed hand arriving in a quarantine truck suggests she has no plans to scale back.