Buffalo News
Jessica White has taken a step back from her fast-paced modeling career, moving back to Buffalo and reaching out to abused women through her new foundation
Jessica White: Buffalo's own top model
By Emma D. Sapong NEWS STAFF REPORTER
Updated: 08/04/08 10:01 AM
Robert Kirkham/Buffalo News “I was a young girl from Buffalo who just had some dreams and pretty much got involved in an industry where they’ll chew you up and spit you out.” –Jessica White
More Photos
During this summer’s Juneteenth celebration, a tall, beautiful woman randomly stopped festivalgoers in Martin Luther King Jr. Park. “Do you go to church?” she asked. “Are you saved?”
Most didn’t answer Jessica White as she tried to spread the word of God. Instead, men pressed her for dates. Women wanted to hear tales of her life since she’d left Buffalo’s East Side 10 years ago for the type of celebrity that happens to only one in a million –that of a supermodel.
White, 24, began her career on the runways in Paris and Milan and has had a remarkable five appearances in Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Edition, spreads in leading fashion magazines and ads for top makeup firms.
But while her professional successes piled up, White couldn’t dodge the downside of the modeling world.
“It’s the fashion industry, so every stereotype that you’ve heard of, that’s exactly what it is,” she said.
By the time she was 18, White was an alcoholic. At 20, she had developed a cocaine habit.
Today, White still enjoys tremendous success in the modeling industry, including a contract with cosmetics giant Maybelline, but she has pulled back some, returning to her Buffalo home in the hopes of reconnecting with her churchgoing roots.
“The industry is so hectic, you can easily get caught up,” White said. “I needed a break; I needed to separate who I was as a businesswoman versus who I was growing up to be as an individual.
“The model Jessica, she’s tough, she’s very tough. She doesn’t take any crap. And Jessica is just a church girl, and she’s in church all the time.”
White says she’s also back to help abused local girls and women through her new Western New York-based foundation, Angel Wings. She recently revealed that she was sexually abused at 14, leading her home to do this type of work.
“Sometimes, all a person needs is a chance, so they can get on their feet,” she said. “I got a chance, and I’m going to help others.”
Achieving the dream
White will tell you she grew up in Buffalo and “everywhere else” since her career took off when she was just 14.
Her early years in Buffalo were happy –a comfortable, stable home with her parents and two older sisters. Things changed, though, when her father, Preston White, died from Lupus when Jessica was 7.
“Jess was devastated, we all were,” said her mother, Fannie White. “She was the apple of his eyes. They were really close.”
Young Jessica suddenly felt the financial strain of living in a single-parent household.
“We were like middle-class when my father was alive, but when he died, it got really hard for us,” she said.
A giddy tomboy, White didn’t harbor dreams of being the next Tyra Banks as a kid; she wanted to be a forensic pathologist. But the never-ending encouragement to model came from all directions: family, friends, classmates and church members.
“People would say, ‘Oh, you are so gorgeous and look at that body, you should be a model,’” Fannie White said. “She would hear it all the time.”
At 14 and a freshman at Kensington High School, White finally embraced the idea.
“I didn’t want to be a statistic, I didn’t want to get pregnant at a young age like everybody else around me, and I wanted to be famous,” she said.
Although tied up most of the week with church, White up to that point had never really prayed. But to achieve her modeling dream, she got on her knees for her “first real prayer.”
Days after her divine request, a visiting minister at Sunday service randomly pulled White from the congregation to the pulpit and announced her prayers would be answered.
“Nobody in the church knew what he was talking about; I had never told anybody,” she said.
A week later, she began training at Susan Makai’s Personal Best modeling school in Snyder. She later attended an international model and talent search in New York City, where she garnered 50 callbacks.
“It was insane; I got the chills,” she recalls. “‘Is it really about to happen? Seriously?’” Seriously.
White signed with IMG, the elite agency that worked with supermodels Kate Moss and Niki Taylor. Within months, the teenager from Buffalo’s East Side was working for the world’s top fashion designers in New York City and Europe.
“Everything happened so fast,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it.”
Her first gig: a high-fashion photo shoot for American Vogue magazine, a rarity for a newcomer and even more rare for a black model.
Lonely and unprepared
Since then, White has traveled the globe, becoming the first black model to appear five consecutive years in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. She is also the first black model to sign two cosmetic contracts — Cover Girl in 2000 and currently a six-year deal with Maybelline.
She has donned the clothing of Ralph Lauren, Oscar de la Renta and other iconic designers on New York City and European runways and has done various campaigns, including the Gap, Chloe and Tommy Hilfiger.
Dubbed “the next big thing” in the industry by Tyra Banks, White even had a role in “Big Momma’s House 2” and appeared in music videos for John Legend and Jay-Z.
Legendary supermodel Beverly Johnson, also a Buffalo native, knew that White was “going to be huge.”
“[White is] stunning and gorgeous, and she takes the most magnificent photos,” Johnson said.
But Johnson also acknowledges that the industry can be tough and lonely.
Models are always traveling by themselves, said Johnson, the first black model to appear on the cover of American Vogue. Models are constantly changing locations and working with different people with each shoot.
“You get very lonely from being away from your family,” said Johnson, who is now a celebrity judge on TV Land’s “She’s Got The Look.”
Michael Gross, a journalist who has written about the fashion industry, said in an e-mail interview that models tend to be unsupervised kids doing an adult’s job “surrounded by adults who don’t give a damn about them and consider them expendable as Kleenex.”
Jessica White is not alone when it comes to models getting into trouble.
In 2005, Moss was photographed in London, allegedly snorting cocaine. The year before, Naomi Campbell admitted on a British talk show that she battled an addiction to alcohol and experimented with drugs. Her outbursts of anger have become the stuff of legend.
Gross, author of “Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women,” said drug use is widespread in the industry because it is part of the culture at large.
“The modeling scene is just a magnified reflection of what goes on all around it, magnified by money and sex and beauty and celebrity and the freedom of action that each allows,” he said.
White admits that she “sunk deeper and deeper into depression and became a manic depressive and got hooked up with the wrong crowd.”
“I was not being smart at all. Everything started to go downhill from there,” she said. “It was fast pace.
“I was still working; I was a functioning addict,” she said, while acknowledging that she often arrived late for shoots.
By the early 2000s, White was in high demand, but she was also penniless.
“I was a supermodel and didn’t have the money to show for it,” said White, who remembers walking in flip-flops in the snow to jobs in Manhattan because she couldn’t afford boots.
“I made a lot of mistakes in the beginning by not being wise with my finances,” she said. “I didn’t have the right people around me; I had a bunch of wolves. I was a young girl from Buffalo who just had some dreams and pretty much got involved in an industry where they’ll chew you up and spit you out.”
White and her mother, who struggled as a single parent to balance her career and family with Jessica’s career, were completely overwhelmed, she said, and not prepared for her rapid success.
“None of us knew how to manage all the money that was coming in so quickly,” White said.
Assignments from her high school in Buffalo were being sent to her all over the world, but White had little energy for homework. By her junior year, homework was a thing of the past and she never received a high school diploma.
Rebuilding her life
The suicide death in June of a Russian model resonated deeply with White. Ruslana Korshunova, 20, who grew up in the industry with White, jumped from a building in Manhattan. White said she was familiar with suicidal thoughts.
From her own experience, White felt people closest to her at one time became more fixated on her skyrocketing career and forgot about her overall well-being.
“I felt like it was more important to them for me to make the money and become famous instead of concentrating on the person who had a soul who was lost and needed some help and foundation, and I wasn’t getting it,” she said.
With her recent move back to Western New York, White, step by step, is rebuilding that foundation. She’s been clean for two years and plans to stay that way. In the fall, she plans to enroll in classes to get her GED. Professionally, she’s signed with Elite Plus, and travels often to work in New York City and Europe. She also says her finances are in much better shape.
White is renting a house in Williamsville, while her seven-bedroom dream house is being built in Orchard Park.
“I never thought I would be back in Buffalo,” she said. “I had decided I was moving to London, marry some English guy and have some cute little biracial babies. It has to be God that I’m back here.”
While here, White wants to help a group of girls and women she’s familiar with: those who have been abused. She wouldn’t reveal details but said that just as her career was taking off, at age 14, she was raped in Buffalo by someone she knows.
“It happened, I learned from it, and I’m healed. I’m moving forward. I forgave them, and I love them,” she said. “We are helping people now; we are not concentrating on the negative of anything.”
So, she is focusing on aiding in the recovery of those who have been through similar horrors by opening transitional housing for female victims of abuse.
White and her lawyers are working out the legalities and location details of the shelter. She describes it as an “empowerment house,” and plans to open it next year.
She also hopes to start a model management company to teach aspiring models the realities of the industry and other things she didn’t know when she began her career.
White has also started White House Productions, with the goal of producing films that tell stories that are ignored.
In her free time, the supermodel goes without makeup and hangs out with her best friend since childhood, Lanita Jones, watching TV or going to the movies.
But most of her time is spent in Lackawanna’s First Ward at church services at Mount Olive Baptist Church.
Still, she hasn’t lost her supermodel glamour. During a recent lunch in Williamsville, she seemed out of place with her long curly hair, oversized designer sunglasses and a strapless sundress. She fondly remembered the highlight of her career so far: last year’s Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. She and other top models got stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame during the weeklong festivities that led to the popular live TV show.
“I was crying that whole week, it meant so much to me,” she said.
White said she’s now balancing such career highs by being grounded in Buffalo.
“I’m going to stay right here; it’s peaceful,” she said. “I’m a better person when I’m here. This place has really put everything in perspective for me. I have the best of both worlds.”
[email protected]
)
