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Model Joan Smalls is conquering the runways of the world: Next stop: Australia
instagram/sundaystyle
Model Joan Smalls is conquering the runways of the world: Next stop: Australia
dailytelegraph.com.au‘You don’t have to be a stereotype’
It’s nearing lunchtime on a sweltering Sunday in Manhattan, and Joan is working the camera for everything she’s got.
In a darkened studio in the West Village, the 27-year-old is as svelte and poised as a rare-breed racehorse, in command of every inch of her athletic body. There’s barely a bad shot on the photographer’s monitor and the shoot wraps dead on time, with smiles and high-fives all around.
It’s easy to see why Puerto Rican-born Smalls has swiftly conquered the modelling world.
In 2013, just three years after she got her big break walking for Givenchy Haute Couture, she made Forbes’ World’s Highest-Paid Models list (coming in at No 8, earning $3.5 million).
Even more impressive is how she’s done it all despite the odds being stacked against her.
While Iman, Naomi Campbell and Tyra Banks may be household names, racial diversity in the fashion industry still has a long way to go. During the 2014 international collections, just 6.8 per cent of the models booked for the world’s major fashion weeks were black, a situation Campbell has labelled as “ignorance”.
Smalls has walked for all the greats – from Chanel to Prada to Ralph Lauren. She was also the first Latina model to sign a global deal with Estée Lauder, the holy grail of modelling contracts. She saw this as a major coup for diversity, and was quoted as saying: “I want to … show the industry and the world that you don’t have to be a certain stereotype to be beautiful. When you look at the world, the world isn’t just one palette. It’s a beautiful rainbow, and why not have someone to represent that rainbow?”
She still remembers the moment she got the Givenchy call in Paris: “I was just walking down the street smiling ear-to-ear, and everybody was looking at me like I was crazy, because they’re all so chic and moody in Paris,” she said.
On the inside, meanwhile: “I was like, ‘Aghh!’, feeling like this was the moment I’d been waiting for. I was telling myself, ‘I’m going to get there super-early and I’m never gonna complain, because this is what I wanted…’ I was like an athlete, hyping myself up.”
It was all a world away from Hatillo – population 42,000 – the town on the northern coast of Puerto Rico where Smalls was raised with her two older sisters (the eldest, Erika, stars with her in Balmain’s autumn ’15 campaign). A studious child, she was inspired by her mother’s career in social work to study psychology at the Interamerican University of Puerto Rico.
“I enjoyed it and I got amazing grades, but it wasn’t my passion,” she says. “Without that, you’ll only ever half-a*** it – excuse my French.”
An avid fan of the Victoria’s Secret catalogues she and her friends would get in the mail (“Although we never ordered anything as we didn’t have credit cards”), she’d never thought much about modelling.
“Then I watched some documentary about models and I realised, ‘Oh, there’s a career where I could get paid to fly all over the world and take pictures? OK…’”
Physically, Smalls had it down. “I grew really tall and gangly,” she says, stretching out her lissom arms to demonstrate, her 179cm frame encased in a simple black spandex dress post-shoot. We’ve moved to a sofa to chat, and up close, her face wiped clean of make-up, there’s an almost eerie symmetry to her features, her complexion a flawless canvas. It’s a little like talking to a Disney princess come to life.
But Hatillo is hardly Hollywood, and it’s a long way from the runways of New York, London and Paris.
After she entered (and lost) a couple of local modelling contests, Smalls says she quickly realised: “I wasn’t going to make it as a model in Puerto Rico – New York was the place to pursue it. But I also knew I had my education on my side, so I’d have something to fall back on. That made me feel more secure about coming to the city to try it out.”
In 2007, at the age of 20 – old for a model just starting out – she moved to New York. At night she’d sleep on a mattress on her cousin’s bedroom floor in Queens, by day she’d travel by bus to castings in Manhattan.
“I began working quickly – as in, I had an income. But the kind of success I wanted – shooting editorial for magazines, doing fashion week – all of that took time.”
But then she got the job with Givenchy – where creative director Riccardo Tisci, renowned for championing diversity in the modelling world, remembers casting Joan for the first time.
“They sent me the picture of this beautiful black girl, and I was like, ‘Wow, can we fly her in and see her?’ She came, and I remember she was very shy. She did three days of a couture fitting with me, and then I put her in exclusively. She was doing my prêt-à-porter as her first show, and look at what she has become today.”
And now she will follow in the footsteps of Indigenous Australian model Samantha Harris in a campaign for David Jones, fronting its new Studio W brand.
The line of street-smart separates will launch this month as part of the department store’s ongoing makeover following its 2014 acquisition by South African holdings company Woolworths.
One of a series of private labels the company will roll out over the coming two seasons, Studio W, is key to the strategy DJs is hoping will net $70–$80 million in the next five years. When Smalls hits the runway at the brand’s launch event in Sydney this week, it will certainly set the tone.
Aimed at the metropolitan working woman, “Studio W speaks to me on a personal level,” says Smalls, describing herself as “a moody dresser”.
“Sometimes I’ll do sexy, sometimes very tomboy, sometimes very preppy. But I try not to overthink it, or try too hard.” And her personal style has not gone unnoticed by her peers. One of her idols, Cindy Crawford, posted on her Facebook page in 2014: “She has great style – sexy and elegant with a touch of tomboy thrown in. And she showed off her great moves in the Yoncé video!”
Ah yes, Smalls ticked a very bootylicious item off her supermodel to-do list when Beyoncé cast her to star with Jourdan Dunn and Chanel Iman in the video for her 2013 hit. What was Bey like to work with?
Smalls almost leaps out of her seat, letting out a very Latina “Ayieeee!” She giggles: “That’s my response to that! Ay! She was spectacular. She’s just so down-to-earth and professional, yet you feel her in the room; she is her own presence. But she also involves people and that’s very special. It’s not like it’s just the Beyoncé show.”
Ask her whom she looks up to in the fashion industry and you might expect Smalls to name Beverly Johnson, the first African-American model to make the cover of US Vogue in 1974, or the new wave of girls bringing global beauty to the runways, but she opts for blonde entrepreneurs Heidi Klum and Gisele Bündchen, although she also name checks Tyra Banks and original supers Crawford and Christy Turlington. “Those women took modelling and used it as a platform to create their own empire. But I don’t really see idols in other people,” says Smalls. “I wasn’t brought up that way. My parents are my idols, because I know them and I appreciate the values they instilled in me, and I know what sacrifices they’ve made to raise a family.”
A strong sense of family is obviously important to Smalls. She says she travels home to Puerto Rico “at least” five times a year, where the first thing she does is kick off her shoes and walk barefoot, and play with the family rottweiler, Karma. She describes herself as: “a diehard island girl”.
“It helps me stay the person that I am, to be bonded with life back home.”
Her parents are getting used to what she does for a living, although, “My mom is always, ‘Make sure you get enough rest.’ But it’s hard to take that advice, because it’s all happening now. Calling in sick or taking a day off doesn’t really happen in my world.”
Her boyfriend of six years, entrepreneur Bernard Smith, is a rock, too. The founder of Modellounge in New York, a space offering models a place to regroup between appointments and catwalk shows, Smith gets the pressures of his girlfriend’s world.
Speaking of which, what was it like to earn her ‘wings’ walking for the lingerie giant? She laughs: “Victoria’s Secret is pure bragging rights. Like, ‘Ha!’ to all the guys in school who made fun of me for being so tall and skinny. I always thought the women in those catalogues looked so powerful. Doing my first show for them was like checking another big item off the list,” she says, ticking the air in front of her.
Other career highlights include her first Chanel campaign. “There’d been a long gap since the last black model shot for them. And just getting to work with amazing photographers like Steven Meisel and Mert and Marcus, I feel so honoured.”
And then there’s the fact she just reached one million followers on Instagram. Does she feel the weight of responsibility that comes with a platform like that?
“We all hold social responsibility when we have people looking at us,” she says.
“You have to be more aware of what you say and do, but that shouldn’t stop you from speaking up for what you believe in.”
Smalls has been working with Project Sunshine, a non-profit providing education and recreational programs to children and families with medical challenges.
“Because of my mom’s work, I do believe children are the future. We need to invest in them,” she says, adding she’s “working on something” to further her philanthropic activity – “Watch this space.”
It’s clear that for now, though, modelling is Smalls’ top priority. But as she’s such a family girl, does she see herself having kids of her own? “Eventually,” she nods. “But I have so much to do with my career first. When I have kids I’ll be so involved, I don’t think I could be a mom and do this. Major kudos to all the women that do have a career and raise children – that is a gift.”
Describing herself and Smith as homebodies who “never go out”, she says she loves to play domestic goddess. Her specialties are “red rice with beans, chicken with onions, and soffritto. Or I do this thing with green plantains, where I cook them, squish them and fry them, and have them with guacamole – so good!”
In fact, she plans to spend the rest of her Sunday at home cooking up a storm. Which means it’s time to send her on her way, a girl with the whole world at her feet.
