Hanne Gaby Odiele

[AlbertNoir]

F/W 2017/18 final showlist (as special request)

TOTAL: 9 shows
Opened: 0
Closed: 0

New York
5 shows

Alexander Wang
Anna Sui
Calvin Klein
Marc Jacobs
Phillip Plein

Paris
4 shows

Dries Van Noten
Esteban Cortazar
Fenty X Puma by Rihanna
Sonia Rykiel

 

[Magic Spells]

models.com;vogue.com; vogue.ru

 

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hypebeast

 

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Elle Brazil









Time

 

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The Best of F/W 17 Off Duty
https://postimage.org/
models

Unposted Wang

Facebook/Alexander Wang

 

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HANNE GABY ODIELE – VOGUE SPAIN – APRIL 2017

Ph: Bec Lorrimer
Stylist: Almudena Guerra
Hair: Edward Lampley
Makeup: Nancy Siler

womenmanagement

 

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EXCLUSIVE – HANNE GABY – ELLE BRASIL MARCH 2017 UHQ

UNSTOPPABLE
PHOTOGRAPHER: MARK ABRAHAMS
MODEL: HANNE GABY ODIELE
STYLING: JULIANA GIMENEZ
HAIR: PETER GRAY
MAKE-UP: HUNG VANNGO

visualising.fashion/wp

 

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Alexander Wang x Adidas Originals Drop 3

wwd

 

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Dazed 100

Hanne Gaby Odiele
Model

The Calvin Klein model and occasional stylist has taken on a new role: giving a voice to those who are intersex

Age
29
Location
New York, United States

“As long as you believe in it, you can pull it off.” So declared Belgian runway regular and sometime stylist Hanne Gaby Odiele when she graced the inaugural Dazed 100 list two years ago. Now the model and muse is back for 2017, having boldly announced a new chapter in her career: as a spokesperson and activist for intersex people.

Odiele wasn’t shy when it came to sharing the news – back in January, she fronted a video for InterACT, a charity which advocates for intersex youth and raises awareness of the harmful surgeries they can be subjected to. “It is very important to me in my life right now to break the taboo,” the NYC-based model declared in an exclusive interview with USA Today, grabbing the attention of the entire fashion industry – and many more besides. “At this point, in this day and age, it should be perfectly all right to talk about this.”

With a decade-long career stomping down catwalks for the likes of Marc Jacobs, Versace, and Calvin Klein (and as a treasured member of BFF Alexander Wang’s #WANGSQUAD), the blonde is perfectly positioned to lead society into a new era of gender-fluidity awareness. Already, she’s challenged perceptions in the fashion industry and brought to light an issue that affects the lives of many but remains discussed by few.

dazeddigital

Hanne is currently at #31, you can vote her up here http://www.dazeddigital.com/project...gaby-odiele-model-biography-dazed-100-profile

 

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Coachella

 

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Lovely video of Hanne shooting for Time Magazine
http://time.com/collection-post/4684955/hanne-gaby-odiele-next-generation-leaders/

 

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Vogue Portugal preview

 

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Hanne Gaby in @acnestudios for the new issue of #dazed with @emmawyman + @susiesobol_makeup + @jawaraw

Great day today with this incredible women. @hannegabysees great to have in Porto, we all love you now time to relax with some @arrepiado_velho

 

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Intersex and proud: model Hanne Gaby Odiele on finally celebrating her body

Apr 23 2017

When the Belgian model revealed she was intersex earlier this year, she gave voice to something she’d always been told to hide. Here, the face of Balenciaga talks about knowing she was different

Like many models, Hanne Gaby Odiele has a lovely limber angularity. Sitting in a Manhattan restaurant booth she seems to open and close like an umbrella, expanding when she’s in full flow, folding up when she’s mulling something over. Folded up and closed off was how she felt for a long time. As a child, she knew something was different about her. She spent a lot of her summers undergoing surgery, and was aware that she would be unable to have children, but the why was always left vague.

“The medical world tells us that we should not talk to anyone about it,” she says. “Always, I was told to hide.” In this way, children like Odiele are taught to be ashamed of a fundamental aspect of their identity: they are intersex. It’s difficult to calculate the exact number of people who are intersex, but interACT Advocates for Intersex Youth estimates it to be about 1.7%, which is about as common as having red hair (1%-2%).

It took a long time for Odiele, now 28, to come out of hiding, but in January she came out publicly in Vogue, and instantly brought into focus the sixth – and least appreciated – letter in the queer acronym, LGBTQI. “For a lot of people, the first time they hear about it is when they talk to me,” Odiele says. “Most people really have no idea.”

Dressed in Adidas jogging bottoms and clutching a bottle of orange soda, she talks rapidly, as if she might have to dart off as quickly as she arrived. Her eyes are bright and animated. “There’s a kind of shame placed on our bodies, like we’re not supposed to talk about it,” she says. “I will never know what it is to be a cis-gender woman, I will never be able to talk about a period or having a child, but I’m not a man either – I’m proud intersex.”

I always felt I was the only one like me, that I had this weird thing going on
Having grown up in a Belgian village in the pre-dawn of social media, Odiele was 17 before she pieced things together, after stumbling across a story in a Dutch teen magazine about an intersex woman who was unable to have children. Seeing a version of herself was a light turning on. “I showed the article to my doctor and he said: ‘Yeah, this is you.’” He’d known about her identity her entire life. Her parents, too.

Like Calliope Stephanides in Jeffrey Eugenide’s 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Middlesex, Odiele was born with internal testes, and no uterus or ovaries. She had one X and one Y chromosome, in keeping with men. “I have XY chromosome insensitivity,” she says. “I was born with internal testicles that produce testosterone, but which my body converts to oestrogen.” She smiles. “It’s crazy, right?”

Although shielded from this knowledge throughout her childhood, Odiele has few recriminations. Her parents were following medical advice, and who challenges doctors? “Whatever the specialist is telling you, you’re going to believe it,” she says. “My parents understood a little, but not all – they’d never spoken to anybody else, never had any contact with other parents in the same situation.”

There’s no one way of being intersex – the term covers around 30 variations of characteristics – but standard procedure has always involved surgery to force the body into one sex or the other, often on the assumption that bigger medical problems will lie in wait down the road. Odiele spent large parts of her childhood in and out of hospitals undergoing treatment, and she knows that time will never come back to her – like the body she was born with, it’s gone. “There are so many complications that come with surgeries, they’re irreversible,” she says. “You have to be on hormone therapy your whole life, and that messes up a lot of things.”

After coming out, Odiele met an intersex woman from Utah who had avoided surgery – a rarity. “She’s a very strong person, with a lot less trauma than I have,” she says. “But most people I’ve met have had surgery. To normalise the body, they just cut things out.” She considers it a human rights violation, an age-old impulse to correct things that don’t conform to the binary ways in which men seek to shape the world. As with transgender rights, she believes greater visibility will change the way people treat intersex people.

As a child, Odiele could feel the pull of the male chromosomes she was born with, but was unable to articulate why. “It’s weird because I went to psychologists my whole life and even when I had a question, everyone just dismissed it.”

In the Catholic school she attended she was a bundle of hyperactivity, always fidgeting in class – flipping her chair, upsetting her desk. “I couldn’t sit still,” she says. “I was always moving around.” She thinks briefly before adding. “They did love me, though, my teachers. They loved and hated me at the same time.”

Finding out she was intersex was both a relief and a shock. “I always felt like I was the only one like me, that I had this weird thing going on – having to go and see the doctor for my genitals, thinking, ‘What the hell is wrong with me?’”

My mum feels guilty about what happened to me. But it was a different time and it was not her fault
Being prodded and stared at for so much of her childhood was humiliating and lonely. Now she feels the solidarity of a community, with just a lingering trace of sadness. So many surgeries, so much energy spent on “fixing” her. “There’s nothing wrong with being a little bit different,” she says – the mantra of the age. “I just don’t understand why we need to fix something that’s not broken.”

It was shortly after diagnosing herself that Odiele began pursuing a modelling career, part of a healing process. “The most female job in the world is modelling,” she says. “I felt like I was playing the system a little bit.” It also got her out of Belgium – first for a shoot for Vogue in Paris (“I was mesmerised by everything”) and then to the US, where catastrophe struck. She was crossing the road when she was hit by a car that ignored a red light. She was 18. “I broke my arms, my legs, and everything,” she says. “I had brain bleeding, too.”

After surviving that, anyone might be forgiven for sinking into a black hole of pity and despair. Not Odiele. Before the accident she’d struggled to emulate the strut of the leggy Brazilian models so much in vogue. “I had two left feet,” she says. “I walked like a boy, basically.” Breaking her legs somehow fixed that. Even while she was recovering in hospital and largely dependent on a wheelchair, she found herself slipping on heels and practising her walk. “And then I blew up,” she says matter-of-factly. “That’s when stuff really started to happen, so maybe everyone’s got to go through a little bad luck and pain, too.” She laughs. That was over 10 years ago. She has been on a streak ever since, a fixture of glossy fashion mags and a favourite of designers such as Balenciaga.

It was shortly after her recovery that Odiele met John Swiatek, a DJ and model who is wholesale director for North America for the Swedish brand, Acne Studios. The two married last July. Any anxiety she felt about telling him she couldn’t have children was premature. They plan to adopt. “He’s adopted and had a great relationship with both sets of parents,” she says. Meanwhile, her parents have made peace with the past through their daughter’s coming-out process. “It was difficult for them,” says Odiele. “My mum especially felt very guilty about what happened and takes it very personally, but this has helped her, too. It was a different time and it was not their fault.”

Although familiar with the arguments for using gender-neutral pronouns, Odiele is not sure it’s a distinction for her. She says: “I don’t feel female and I don’t feel male, but I do like ‘she’.” At airports she has sometimes been called “sir”, and that doesn’t sit well. “I’ve had to live as a female for so long, so it’s kind of like, ‘How did you know?’” At the same time, being intersex has enabled her to live outside some gender norms. “I feel I have a distinct view on certain things that other girls can’t see,” she says. “Like women sometimes have to dress a particular way, or there’s expectations, and I feel or see them differently.” But her difficulty relating to girls at school has not carried over to adulthood. “I have so many great, great girlfriends – models – which is pretty funny, because you think they’d be fragile, but they’re actually the toughest women I know.”

And they, undoubtedly, would return the compliment.

Fashion editor: Jo Jones. Make-up by Linda Gradin at L’Atelier NYC using MAC. Hair by Fernando Torrent at L’Atelier NYC using Bumble and Bumble. Fashion assistants: Bemi Shaw and Celine Sheridan. Model agency: Women Management

theguardian
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion...odiele-the-model-finally-celebrating-her-body

Bow down: Hanne Gaby Odiele - in pictures


theguardian
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/gallery/2017/apr/22/bow-down-hanne-gaby-odiele-in-pictures

 

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HANNE GABY ODIELE – DAZED & CONFUSED – SPRING 2017

Photography: Clara Balzary
Stylist: Emma Wyman
Hair: Jawara
Makeup: Susie Sobol
Casting: Noah Shelley

womenmanagement

 

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Another article about Hanne this morning with some new sad info

HANNE GABY ODIELE: TOP INTERSEX MODEL ON HOW DOCTORS TRIED TO CHANGE HER GENDER AS A CHILD

29-year-old Belgian model Hanne Gaby Odiele hit the front pages a few months ago with her public announcement that she was intersex.

In her video, she also called for an end to the “traumatising surgeries” that are still forced on intersex children to try and change their gender. And she’s now explained why she decided to make the video and what it was like growing up intersex in a quiet village in Belgium.

“Most people don’t know we exist,” she said.

Odiele was born with androgen insensitivity syndrome, which means she is genetically male (so has XY chromosomes), neither uterus nor ovaries, and internal testes.

However her body is resistant to male hormones and she appeared like any other baby girl - her parents thought they had a daughter.

Like many intersex children, Odiele was forced to undergo an operation to make her female (intersex children are usually made female because it’s easier to remove than to add body parts).

“They did more tests and they’re like, ‘Oh, don’t worry, we can just change [her] by surgery, she’ll never even know. It’s all going to be OK,’ ” Odiele told The Times.

“But it’s, like, those surgeries were never explained to me. They didn’t tell the full story, like the harm that could happen. They always said I was the only one, which is not the truth.”

In fact, in her video announcement, Odiele says nearly two per cent of the world’s population are intersex, which is the same as the number of redheads.

As a child, Odiele and her parents told no one she was intersex - not her friends, grandparents or even older brother knew the truth. It was kept secret. She was, in her own words, a “very timid and shy” child.

Aged nine, doctors told Odiele she needed to have her internal testes removed or else they might become cancerous, a claim she now believes is a lie.

“There was no medical evidence that I was going to get cancer,” she says. “Women don’t get their breasts taken out because they might get breast cancer... A normal cis male doesn’t get their testicles cut off either, because they might get prostate cancer or whatever.”

Every few months, Odiele paid a visit to the doctor for “scary treatments”: “I’d go into a room and then my parents were kindly asked to leave. Then all of a sudden four more students come into the room and they all look at my genitals, and they put a blanket over my eyes.

“I feel them touch me and look at me and call me by numbers, like, ‘This is subject blah blah blah.’ They always said I had a bladder problem, and I was like, ‘Mmm, there’s something more.’ ”

Then she had the operation.

“They take away my testicles and from that moment on, it’s kind of like I’m in menopause,” she says. “Since then, I’ve been on hormone replacement therapy, which is messed up.”

The reason she needs HRT is because her internal testes were producing testosterone, but her body rejects it. “So my testosterone is automatically transformed to oestrogen,” she says.

At 18 - after she’d started modelling - Hanne underwent an operation for vaginal reconstruction, which she says can have “extreme” consequences: “Like they cut away sensitive parts that may lead to my having no feeling after… Sex becomes very difficult, even the idea in your mind. Also, incontinency - no bladder control.”

Odiele has now modeled for top designers including Chanel, Prada and Balenciaga, and she’s using her high-profile position to raise awareness about the arbitrary operations intersex children are often subjected to.

“I know people, intersex people, with the same condition as me who didn’t have the surgery, and they live happy, healthy lives,” she says.

Even if they struggle psychologically with being intersex, Odiele believes people who don’t have the operations have fewer psychological traumas because of the surgeries: “They still feel more complete. I feel like something has been taken away from me for no reason.”

Last summer, Odiele married her boyfriend, John Swiatek, also a model, in a field in upstate New York.

“My identity is female and the energy that I carry myself is mostly female,” she says. “Energy. That’s how I think I see gender. As, like, an energy level almost.

“But again, it’s like, I will never know how it is to bear a child, never know how to have a period or to talk about many of the things that females think, or think is important to them. I’m like, ‘I don’t really get that,’ but then I don’t pee standing up either. Like, I’ve never wanted to be a man.

“It’s like, I’m very happy and comfortable being the sex I am and not wanting to change it for anything, actually, in the world, especially now that I live my truth. The past three months, it’s like the most amazing thing that I’ve done for myself actually.”

independent.co.uk

 

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And another from Monday that is apparently too long to post
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/my-life-as-an-intersex-supermodel-92f7d57xh
thetimes.co.uk

 

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Congrats to her on buying a second property!

'Gender Is Just Limiting Society': The Model Fighting for Intersex Rights

by Rae Witte
PROFILES
MAY 3 2017

Hanne Gaby Odiele spent her 20s walking the runway for Chanel and Givenchy. Now she's taking on a new challenge as the world's most high-profile intersex activist.

On January 23, just days after Donald Trump's inauguration, Hanne Gaby Odiele announced the biggest news of her life: She came out as intersex in USA Today. The 29-year-old model is better known for walking the runway for Givenchy, Prada, and Chanel, but she is now taking on another role as one of the world's most—and some say only—high-profile intersex activist.

As defined by the youth advocacy group InterACT, "intersex" is an umbrella term refers to people born with one or more of a range of variations in sex characteristics that fall outside of traditional conceptions of male or female bodies. Hanne was born with androgen insensitivity syndrome, meaning that although she physically appears to be biologically female, she has XY chromosomes and was born with internal, undescended testes.

When I meet her in a restaurant a few blocks from her home in Williamsburg, Hanne is in black pants and an embellished black top beneath a cozy green coat. As soon I finish my coffee, she orders champagne and I do the same. We talk about fun stuff: her in-laws visiting for the weekend, her place that her and her husband just bought, their wedding, how they met, and what we both love about New York. But her coming out this year marked the biggest change of her life. "That whole week was a sleepless week," she recalls. "They [USA Today] called us [her and her husband] and said, 'At four in the morning, it's gonna come out.'"

Intersex identity is often spoken about in scientific and biological terms, boiling down to medical terminology about chromosomes and genetic makeup. Hanne says this falls short of capturing what life as an intersex person is actually like. "It's not like some mythical woman with a penis and a vagina. It's more complicated than that. It's more personal than that. It's more real than that. More common, too, then people think."

When she was very young, Hanne fell ill and had to undergo routine blood work at the hospital. When doctors returned to speak to her parents, they congratulated them: "Your son is healthy," they said. Her parents were concerned that the results had been mixed up with a male patient, but doctors soon diagnosed their daughter as intersex.

At ten, she underwent surgery to remove her testes and was subsequently put on estrogen to kick off the most crucial, albeit awkward, years in anyone's life: puberty. "I was very confused. My pre-teen years were very difficult for me. It's already difficult for normal kids that age. My natural hormones literally got cut out, and then I was put on prescription drugs to fit in with the other children."

"It was like going through menopause and puberty at the same time," she remembers. "The summer after I had my testes taken out is when I figured out there was something wrong." Her doctors kept her in the dark about her condition; Hanne was only told that she would never have a period and would never bear children. They said that there was no one else like her. "I knew whenever I played with dolls my mom would cry. I knew I wouldn't be able to have kids. My parents were open about that very early on."

Her doctors were also unhelpful when it came to mitigating her own unease. When she went for medical checkups, students would routinely come in to gawp at her. "Every single time I would go to the doctor I had to go to various uncomfortable appointments," she remembers. "All of a sudden they would have a class coming into the room and they'd politely ask my parents to leave, put a sheet over my face, and one by one [started] looking at my private parts. I knew something was obviously different. It was difficult."

Sex is a bigger spectrum than just a penis and vagina. Know what I'm saying?
Imagine negotiating middle school, acne, puberty, dating while having an enormous question mark hanging over one of the most private parts of your life: your gender identity. "I was a little bit of wild child, like ADHD. It wasn't the best time of my life," she says. "I dated a few guys, but I was always kind of self destructive in that way. I never could have it to a certain point because I knew something was wrong and I never wanted to go there."

Thankfully, Hanne had a breakthrough when she turned 17. Browsing through a Dutch magazine, she stumbled across an article about young intersex women. "It described exactly what I have. No period. I won't be able to have kids. I thought, 'Oh my god, this looks just like me.'" After confronting her doctors, they confirmed her suspicions.

Hanne quickly connected with the writer of the article and went on to meet other intersex women at a conference in Holland. It was a life-changing experience, but it also preceded a brand new phase of her life: her career as an international model. She would spend her 20s walking in Fashion Week and being photographed for the cover of Vogue. "Literally a month after, I got this cover for modeling and I've never really been back to my country."

Hanne's experience of surgery prompted her to get involved with intersex rights.

But just after turning 18, she had vaginal reconstructive surgery—an operation that she'd been putting off for years. "It was surgery that I wasn't really informed [of] what the consequences could be. I told them many times I don't want to do it," she says. Her doctors insisted on it. Once it was over, she buried the idea of ever coming out. According to Hanne, the side effects of the surgery can include loss of sexual sensation and incontinence—and all for what is increasingly regarded as a procedure that forces the body to adhere to social norms.

"In most cases, the surgeries that have been done for us are just out of fear for non-binary bodies," Hanne says of intersex children and young people. "For parents and doctors, surgeries can be too harmful. If it's not consensual they shouldn't do it. If the person doesn't know enough, if the person is healthy, why do surgery?"

Ultimately, it was Hanne's experience with surgery that pushed her to connect with InterACT and speak up about her experience. "You don't need to fix anything that isn't broken," she says firmly. "[My last surgery] was basically done just out of non-binary fears. Sex is thought to be heterosexual, penis needs to fit in a vagina, but sex is a bigger spectrum than just a penis and vagina. Know what I'm saying? The trauma that can be done by non-consensual and irreversible surgeries is bigger than just being something that is normalized."

Hanne offers a myriad of reasons—both personal and bigger than her—to explain why it felt like the right time to come out. "I think the LGBTQ community has paved the way a bit, especially in the last year. We've seen so many things come up for trans rights which is great. I'm all about it." But when it comes to intersex people, she adds, "I've always felt like our community has been a little left out. We're unrepresented."

Everything happening in her personal life made it feel right, too. She got married to her boyfriend of eight years, John Swiatek, last year and they've bought a house; she says she's about to turn 30, too, and feels like her career is in the right place. But the intersex community was still rife with horror stories of teens having dire side effects to surgeries that could be deemed largely cosmetic. "When a 13-year-old girl says she has sclerosis or loss of sensation, something isn't right," Hanne says. "They took her natural hormones. It's ****ed up."

Her long term desire is to see gender norms die out, but she knows the challenges we're currently up against in this country. "You get put in a box from day you are born. 'You have a vagina, you're this,'" she parrots. "'You have a penis, you're this.' The in-betweens aren't even considered. You just get changed. It's not just a box you tick. It's a spectrum, and it should never limit you to be what you want to be. Gender is just limiting society as a whole."

Hanne speaks with an unstoppable energy—it's clear that she is proud to share her story and show her support for other intersex people. In a world where celebrities like Miley Cyrus openly ID as gender fluid or nonbinary, it's easy to forget that this is one coming out that is truly groundbreaking. "Hanne is the most prominent figure in the world to ever disclose that they are intersex. Not only that, but Hanne is taking it a step further by also advocating for intersex rights around the globe," InterACT executive director Kimberly Zieselman told Broadly. "The level of intersex visibility has never been higher, thanks to Hanne."

InterACT is working with Hanne to bring visibility to an underrepresented community and to highlight that surgery is not the only option for intersex people. "I'd like to see those surgeries disappear and to hopefully within 10 to 15 years to have happy, healthy intersex kids [who] can just be out and about, not needing to hide anymore, and they and their parents can speak openly about it," she says.

Hanne recognizes and owns her story, but also realizes that it couldn't have happened if a stroke of luck hadn't led her to flip through that Dutch magazine. It's been a long journey from there, but one that could never have ended any other way. "I could not do anything further before I got this off my chest," she says. "I just want to live my authentic self."

All photos by Brayden Olson.

broadly.vice.com
https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/model-hanne-gaby-odiele-intersex-rights-interview