With a new baby, fashion line and her reality show debuting this week, the E! star is enjoying her time at home
Giuliana Rancic seems to be everywhere at once: on the Emmy Awards’ red carpet chatting up celebrities, in New York launching a breast cancer detection campaign for P&G, on the set of E!’s “Fashion Police” with Joan Rivers and Kelly Osbourne, at HSN debuting her brand new clothing collection. And that’s just last week.
But as a brand-new mother to 1-month-old Edward Duke Rancic (whom she and her husband, Bill, call “Duke”), she says she’s enjoying the leisurely pace of a three-month maternity leave in Chicago — with quick bursts of work being a rare exception to mornings spent in bed with her husband and infant son.
“I wanted to have a nice amount of time with the baby to bond and just for us to be a family,” says Rancic. “We were like, ‘So, we’ve got three months of maternity leave … Chicago, right?’ ”
A big part of the draw is their wide circle of friends and family, who are thrilled to pitch in on baby duty. “Bill has three older sisters and a mom who love baby-sitting,” says Rancic. So the couple has been spotted around town, making the occasional dinner outing to the restaurant they co-own in Chicago, RPM Italian at 52 W. Illinois. (On the advice of their doctor, they’re waiting until Duke is two months old to take him out).
Family time happens every day after Duke’s early morning feeding.
“We just love to be in bed with him,” says Rancic. “We watch him breathe, we play with him … we are enamored. And Duke loves when Bill’s holding him giving him a bath. He gives him these great head rubs and Duke closes his eyes every time Bill rubs his head. He just loves him.”
All of their new-parent moments — like installing car seats and figuring out sleep schedules (the Rancics alternate nighttime feedings) — have been taped for the new season of their Style Network show “Giuliana & Bill,” which debuts Oct. 2. Last season, viewers watched Giuliana and Bill announce their pregnancy via gestational surrogate, whose identity was kept secret. This season, her identity is revealed as viewers watch the rest of her pregnancy, Duke’s birth and the Rancics’ new roles as first-time parents.
Deciding what to show wasn’t easy. “About a week before the delivery we told the network, ‘We don’t want cameras in the delivery room,’ ” says Rancic. “That’s our very personal footage. Instead, Bill and I decided we were going to have a home video camera.”
After reviewing the footage, they decided that they should share this stage of their lives, too. “This is our sixth season and people have followed our story for years,” says Rancic. “To have people praying for you and supporting you and wanting the best for you and wanting you to have this baby so badly, and then to say, ‘Thanks for all your prayers, thanks for your support, we’re not showing the baby.’ That’s wrong.”
It’s a policy Rancic has stuck to over the last few years, sharing experiences both glamorous and painful with her viewers. She’s allowed the show to chronicle her struggle with infertility, and then last fall she disclosed a breast cancer diagnosis that resulted in her double mastectomy in December. Through it all, she has remained optimistic. “I’m on medicine [tamoxifen] for five years, and I have four and a half left. But I’m feeling great. No major side effects, so it’s been going well.”
After her diagnosis, she postponed a clothing collection she began designing for HSN two years ago. Two weeks after her surgery, she jumped back into work full speed and began designing the fall collection that debuted last week. (She’ll be on the air on HSN on Nov. 9 and 10.)
“It’s a lot of good modern takes on basic pieces,” says Rancic. “It’s all in my closet in Chicago so I wear it a lot.” Her favorites: items in chartreuse and cobalt blue (“big colors for fall”) and a fur-collared sweater (“I wear it with jeans; I wear it with leggings”).
And while she’s on leave from E! until mid-November, she gamely sent her “Fashion Police” co-host Kelly Osbourne a box of clothes from the collection. “I’m waiting to hear feedback; hopefully it’s good,” she jokes. “You always have to worry. No one is safe — not even the hosts.”
—Susanna Negovan
