Adut Akech models for Chanel and Valentino but here’s why she’s still an Adelaide girl at heart
ALICE BIRRELL
12 November 2018
A paradox of youthful élan and uncommon strength, Adut Akech is the newly crowned model supernova, claiming the spring/summer ’19 season walking in shows from New York to Paris. Fantasy and reality collide as she returns home to Adelaide to take a turn in couture: bold, spirited and surrounded by her forever grounding force, family. Here, read the full cover story and see every picture from Vogue Australia’s December 2018 issue.
A storm system is quietly wending its way across the Adelaide Hills on a spring day as Adut Akech Bior steps out of a car. Tendrils of charged cloud float menacingly downward as the 18-year-old hikes up a couture gown heaped in cake-like tiers. She catches it by a hair from trailing on the ground as the first plump raindrops fall over Saint Columba College. The name the industry is repeating worldwide is back home and back at school – a cluster of butter-coloured weatherboard buildings flanked by rosebushes and gums an hour’s drive from the Adelaide CBD – although this time she’s hurrying to save an Alexis Mabille dress from the weather.
“There’s De Jager,” she says from under the safety of an umbrella, recognising the head of the senior school greeting us warmly. “He’s excited,” she says with droll fondness. “I used to get homesick about my room, my car and school. Who would have thought?” At a clip behind her to get undercover is Brianna Lang, her best friend, who she met in year 10, also here to be in Vogue’s shoot. Adut returns to her family as often as her schedule will allow. This time she’s back for a few weeks before flying straight to her base in New York for the start of the spring/summer shows. It will be her biggest season yet and cement her in the minds of fashion’s leaders as undoubtedly one of the faces of the year, giving way to rumblings about a once-in-a-lifetime type of model, but she’s not to know that yet.
Right now there is a feeling of homecoming and reunion, making it easy to forget she was studying here less than a year ago. For Adut a year might feel like a long time. After two seasons booked as a Saint Laurent exclusive, beginning in September of 2016, she has had two blue-chip fashion months, the kind agents dream of. In July, hand-picked by Karl Lagerfeld, she became only the second black model ever to walk as Chanel’s bride, an overdue moment, preceding her induction to The Business of Fashion’s 500 – a list of the most influential names in fashion. It was all bookended at one end by a turn in Tim Walker’s momentous 2018 Pirelli calendar, the first with an all-black cast, and on the other by the September shows, with 33 exits, opening one and closing three, including Valentino, where she is a favourite.
Shuttered inside her former science classroom, the wind is whistling outside. A textbook school lab, it is filled with beakers, Bunsen burners and anti-bullying posters: ‘Change starts with you!’ Her old teachers come to say hello while she waits for the shot to be set up, one giving her a hug. “Do you remember me wearing these?” she asks Louis de Jager, holding up a pair of school shoes with evidently the wrong coloured sole. He mock scoffs. “He told me I couldn’t wear them but he gave up.”
“We were rebels,” says Lang. “But we were good,” says Adut. “We were the best humans in the school. We used to hang out together in that room at lunch,” she says, gesturing to an ante-room off to the side that looks perfect for conferring secrets. Adut has an obvious energy that you can imagine would make her fast friends with anyone: warmth that is magnetic and a joyful vitality that doesn’t feel concerted. With a smile that reveals a gap in her teeth, the kind of cherubic lips designers draw in exaggerated fashion sketches and legs with a length hard to untangle in your mind, she is both innocence and grace. In her gown for the shot she slouches into her heels, toggling into a louche youthfulness with alarming speed. It’s why she inhabits the clothes, be it streetwear and chunky sneakers or conceptual high couture, in a way that fits seamlessly with her personality. The combination is transfixing.
Although she has met allies all over the world, Adut maintains a small group of friends. “My circle is so tiny. I pick my friends very wisely, and very carefully,” she says. “I get along with everyone and anyone, but there’s a difference between just getting along and actually being friends.” She counts models Kaia Gerber and Fran Summers as actual friends. “Adut is amazing. She has this presence about her that goes beyond her undeniably beautiful looks,” Gerber writes over email. “People appreciate working with someone as kind as her, who creates a positive atmosphere.” Summers feels the same: “Adut is my best friend in this industry as we started doing shows at pretty much the same time. We tell each other everything. She can make anyone feel special.” As they’re in the running to book the same jobs, it would be understandable if competition reared its head between friends. Adut doesn’t go in for this. “I get so happy when I see my really good friends going so well; they’re opening shows, they’re closing shows,” she says. During fashion month she gets texts every morning from them checking on her, saying: “How are you feeling today?” or: “I hope you have a good day.”
It’s a world away from the fierce model moguls of the 80s, or the anonymous seen-not-heard girls of the early aughts. It also tips past the social-media model and into a new generation of model-muse: the girl with heart, who makes it cool to be nice. “I don’t think I’m more beautiful than anyone or anything, but I feel like my personality is the reason why people actually do fall in love with me,” she hazards without conceit. “If you are just a nasty, horrible person, but you’re the most beautiful person, nobody’s going to want to work with you. I just feel like it’s hard not to be nice to someone, you know?”
To that end Adut says when she sees a new face backstage she asks if they’re okay. “I know exactly how they feel. I tell them it’s normal to be nervous, it’s normal to be this or that. I feel like a mum when I’m giving advice,” she says, laughing. When Adut walked for Saint Laurent in 2016, her major runway debut, she was 16, had represented her home town as the face of the Adelaide Fashion Festival, been signed to Chadwick in Melbourne and Sydney for less than a year and had travelled alone to Paris after doing a casting from afar. “It’s rare that we book a model having never met them in person, but in Adut’s case we decided to confirm her after viewing only her casting video,” say Piergiorgio Del Moro and Samuel Ellis Scheinman, casting directors for the Saint Laurent show. “She was demure, but she was not shy, and the way she interacted with the camera foreshadowed her incredible presence and energy on the runway.”
When a model is talked about in the terms that Adut currently is, as a revolutionary force, a modern-day Alek Wek, it is a signal. Hitting on what designers want to articulate and who women want to be, a model can define an era, or, at least, define a year. This season there was unprecedented diversity on the runway, but deeper than that, an edifying sense that this new cohort of models, accepting of everyone, aren’t just there to check a box.
“When I first started there were a select few black models who were doing good, and nobody else was noticed, but now every season there’s somebody coming in, there are black girls, and Asian girls – different girls,” says Adut, who in just three years has noticed a change and sees not only runway privileges but high-paying advertising jobs increasingly available for a diverse range of women. “I always say there’s still a long way to go, but, you know, you can’t take away from the fact that movement is happening.”
When Adut debuted at Saint Laurent she overcame homesickness, and a possible case of deep vein thrombosis, spending her first eight hours in Paris in hospital, to walk the show. At that point she had previously only modelled locally, starting out for her aunty, who was a designer. She attributes her determination to her mother. “I am who I am today because of my mum,” she says. “[She] is the hardest-working, most independent woman I’ve known in my whole life and I guess that’s why I’m so independent. I’m her mini her.”
Adut Akech Bior grew up in the UN Kakuma refugee camp, in an arid area in north-west Kenya, near the Ugandan and South Sudanese borders. Today it has a population of over 185,000 refugees who have fled violence and unrest in the East African region. From Narus in South Sudan, the family fled over the Kenyan border to Kakuma, where Adut spent time playing with her siblings while her older sister Kim went to school, the only one the family could afford to educate. There was one oil lamp to use at night, so Kim taught Adut to write during the day. When the family moved to Adelaide in 2008 they were some of the 13,412 refugees granted visas. Today South Sudan still produces the third most refugees in the world – 2.4 million out of 25.4 million globally.
Adut was eight and her mum looked after them all. “We didn’t come from much. We were refugees. We don’t have a dad, we don’t have a father who has been significant in our lives,” she says. “Our mum was busy working for us; it’s not that she didn’t want to spend time with us, but she was working so that we’d have something to eat and the rent was paid.”
When she was younger Adut was sometimes known as Mary, her mother’s name, as people at school would find it hard to pronounce. When she began modelling she switched back to her real name. Today Adut has taken after her mother. She promised her mum she would finish school and buy her a car and a house. Her teachers described her as feisty at first, maturing when she got to the pointy end of her studies, knowing she could make something of modelling. Now she has done two out of three, buying her mum a car and finishing her studies, sometimes from make-up chairs or on her phone on the fly.
Back at her house in the Adelaide suburbs, a short drive from her school, there are people coming and going. At home there are her siblings: sister Kim, 21, and younger sister Alakiir, 17, then sister Yar, nine, and brother Bior, 12. Her cousin Deng and his wife Ayak also live in the house. Her 20-month-old baby sister Akoul is playing with clothes, or trying to escape out the front door before Adut, dressed in bunny suit-like Schiaparelli couture, scoops her up. Something is always happening. “That’s just how we are in the Sudanese community, in our culture. Coming from a big family, we are all just so welcoming of people who come into our family. We enjoy having a lot of people in our house. It’s nice.”
“I also have an extra-close relationship with my siblings, because I raised three of them, really. My mum was there, she would come home, but I was there, looking after them, staying with them all day, making sure they were fed,” she continues. “My little siblings are like my children.” Akoul is particularly important to her, and there’s hint of sadness when she talks about going back to New York. “I feel like she’s the only sibling out of my four siblings where I feel like I have not been that significant in her life. I want her to grow up knowing who I am and knowing the reason that I am not around, but there’s a reason why I’m doing what I’m doing and it’s for their future, it’s for her future. One day when she gets older I can explain to her the reason why I was not that significant.”
“Everyone’s really close, everyone has each other’s back. Always,” says Lang, who has always felt welcome at the home and has seen her friend grow up. “She’s really strong. She manages being away at 18, living in New York on her own. I admire her for that, because I could not do that.” Only two years in and Adut is pursuing philanthropic endeavours. “This modelling thing is not something that is going to last for the rest of my life,” she says, already like an old hand. She is working with the UNHCR to highlight the plight of refugees, and in particular in the camp she spent eight years growing up in, a place that faces challenges with clean water, overcrowding and illness like malaria and cholera, among many others.
“We were once in a position where we needed help. My mum has taught me things like being grateful for what you have and to stop wanting more. You know, tomorrow is not promised for anyone,” she reflects. Now and in the future Adut’s story is likely to become more common – the all-American girl scouted in a shopping mall scenario no longer par for the course. With massive displacement from conflict and climate disasters on the rise, her upbeat outlook through adversity is the kind of buoying force that has a knock-on effect. People like Del Moro and Scheinman see this in her. “Her ability to remain kind to all is an important part of the happiness she delivers,” they say.
She wants to expand her role with the UN in the future, working toward an ambassadorship. “It is my purpose to help other people. To be able to do that, to help people where I came from is an amazing feeling.” She wants to complete a diploma in entrepreneurship and thinks about having her own business in fashion. She also has a love of writing. “At school my favourite subject was English,” she says. “Even to just have the opportunity to write some pieces … I actually want to write a book about my life in the future.”
As we leave, the family congregates on the front lawn to say goodbye. On the phone weeks later, she’s remembering the end of the shoot at her house. “It felt so weird when you guys left. I don’t know, everybody was just acting so down and it was just like a weird energy,” she says, laughing. A defining image of the springs/summer ’19 season was the closing of Pierpaolo Piccioli’s Valentino show, featuring Adut in a wafting black gown, that received a standing ovation. When Piccioli and Adut do fittings they talk about life. “I never want to leave; I’m having so much fun and I’m enjoying myself. He is always asking about how my mum’s doing and how my family’s doing,” she says. “He stresses to me to always be myself. I’m such a free, happy spirit. He says: ‘Never shy away, never try to hide who you are.’”
Although she’s experiencing the rarer spoils life has to offer, she’s most interested in the photos taken of her family together. “They are memories I’ve made with the people I love the most,” she says. She stole a shot on her phone of mum and her baby sister so she could look at it when she’s thousands of kilometres apart, a simple thing that makes her happy. “You need to live your life being grateful every day, waking up and having something to eat, having somewhere to live – it is more than enough.”
