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Jasmine Tookes Opens Up About Her Pregnancy Journey

Photographed by Jerome Duran, styled by Cary Robinson, hair by Marty Harper, and makeup by Leah Pike

For the first few months, Jasmine Tookes couldn’t decide how she wanted to announce her pregnancy. Part of it was because “I couldn’t find the right way that I wanted to do it—a way that felt true to me,” she tells Vogue.

Yet it was also due to sheer exhaustion. Like so many other women, Tookes experienced chronic fatigue during her first 12 weeks: “I was so tired to the point I couldn’t even read emails coming through—I’d fall asleep sitting at my computer. I almost fell asleep driving my car,” she admits. “The tiredness was something I had never experienced.” So, instead, she and her husband Juan David Borrero kept the news quiet until Tookes was six months along, and the first-trimester side effects had subsided.

Tookes, realizing the lack of quality photographs she and her Snapchat executive husband Borrero had taken over the years, decided she wanted maternal mementos that would last a lifetime. “My husband and I have only had photos taken together on our wedding day,” she said. “I wanted to remember this special moment.” So she asked Jerome Duran, who she has frequently done campaigns with, to capture the moment.

Inspired by archival Ralph Lauren ads and Peter Lindbergh photographs, Tookes and Borrero settled on a black-and-white, minimalist mood for the images. To keep the mood on set intimate, they asked Tookes’s mother, Cary Robinson, to style them. She put the couple in sleek, tailored pieces: in one photograph, the model wears a Marcela London coat, in another, a Theory white button down and Frame Jeans. (Borrero, meanwhile, paired Tom Ford pants with a Rag & Bone sweater.)

It turns out that Robinson has already been giving her daughter parenting tips as well as fashion ones. “She has said to me, ‘Don’t go overboard and just buy everything that everyone tells you to get,’” Tookes says. “She basically tells me you only really need the bare essentials.”

What has been the most important thing she’s learned about pregnancy thus so? Tookes says it’s to separate herself from stress. “I’m a firm believer that whatever I feel—and any stress that I’m carrying—can very easily transfer to the baby,” she says.

The model admits, however, that this is often easier said than done. “Every day is scary—you never know what’s going to happen,” she says. “So I just pray, hope for the best, and try to keep an open mind.” For now, Tookes is focusing on one thing—that she and her husband, like so many others before them, are about to reach a once-in-a-lifetime milestone.

Originally published in Vogue.com

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