According to prosthetics designer Mike Marino, who frequently works with Klum on her costumes, a lot goes into bringing these costumes to life. Klum and her team started thinking about this year's ensemble basically the minute Halloween 2025 ended. In the past, Klum has famously dressed as Medusa, a worm, the wig-wearing version of E.T., and a peacock, among many, many other beloved costumes—never the same thing twice! Plus. this was the 25th anniversary party, so the stakes were high (five). “Sometimes the most ordinary things can become the most extraordinary when you look at them a little differently,” Klum wrote on Instagram. “I wanted something unexpected, a little weird, a little creepy, and unlike anything I’d ever done before." This was definitely that! No one expected her to go as a hand.

The hand costume needed a combination of “harnesses, mechanics, motion, fluid motion—not fluid like liquid, but stuff that moves sort of organically,” Marino tells Allure. Despite the scale of the hand, it was actually pretty lightweight, Marino says, made of a “super lightweight upholstery foam and latex” that weighed about eight to 10 pounds, plus the harnesses, straps, and some silicone. Klum was inside pulling specific mechanisms to make the hand move. Marino describes the yearly costume process as “R&D experiments” with no instructions. To craft the gory but hilarious face, Marino first made sculptures. “I created two layers, one showing the muscle, organs, and fat, and another with a goofy expression that I thought would work well with the giant hand and give the whole thing a slightly comedic edge,” he shared on Instagram. “Like a mutant muppet.”

The team tries to do as much pre-work as possible, including fittings and pre-painting, says Marino. This year, the actual “getting ready" started around 3 p.m. eastern time on Halloween, and Klum made her debut late that night. “Miraculously, it always comes together, but somehow it always takes forever, even if it's an easy thing,” Marino shares.