Heidi Klum was told auf wiedersehen as a pregnant model.

The Project Runway host looked back on the roadblocks she faced during her decades-long career in the fashion industry, revealing that she was once rejected because she was pregnant with one of her four kids.

“I remember I had one client. When I was pregnant, they did not want to work with me anymore,” Heidi—mom to kids Leni, 21, Henry, 20, Johan, 19, and Lou, 16, with ex-husband Seal—recalled in an interview with Paper published Feb. 23. “They thought that I was not sexy anymore, because I was now a mother.”

The 52-year-old also had trouble finding designers who wanted to dress her baby bump.

“You didn’t see a lot of pregnant women on television,” she said. “I was pregnant with all my kids always on the show, and it was a challenge for me, because pregnancy clothes were really hard to find at the time.”

That’s why Heidi started not one, but two maternity clothing lines in 2010.

READ Heidi Klum Can Barely Walk in Jaw-Dropping Naked Outfit on Grammys 2026 Red Carpet

“Because it’s like, ‘What am I gonna wear?'” she quipped. “I’m not hiding in the house pregnant. I’m on the stage, I’m on TV, and it’s a show about fashion, I need to have good things!”

Fortunately, there’s been a “major shift” in culture, according to Heidi’s oldest daughter Leni, who is now embarking on her own modeling career. As she told the magazine, “Before, with my mom’s generation, it was a stricter kind of criteria you needed to fit into, and I think a lot has changed now, and it’s given many different people an opportunity to be in the industry.”

And while Heidi’s eldest son Henry agreed that he “would say the same,” both he and Leni were inspired by their mom’s journey to take up modeling.

“We would always visit her on her set days,” he recalled. “And we all were just super interested. She just looked like she was having fun in her sets. And I just wanted that feeling as well.”

Leni added, “I just fell in love with it, and I’m still in love with it now.”

For a closer look at Heidi and Leni’s mother-daughter moments, read on.

PHOTOS Leni Klum, Heidi Klum, 2022

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Chelsea Lauren/Shutterstock

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