Atuai - Represented by Trump Model Management

The 16 year old beauty just happens to be the niece of Alek Wek. That gorgeous smile must run in the family.

Source: TFS/simplylovely

Alek Wek from Eluxury Catalog

I have a drawer full of pages that I've ripped out of magazines and catalogs over the years. These are of Alek Wek from an old Eluxury catalog.

Alek Wek on Surface Magazine #72

Alek Wek for MAC Cosmetics STYLISTICS line

The cultivated new cool of 21st century hepcats. When it comes to style, design and hip, they're in the know...Culture's rarest and richest pearls. Smooth. Diamond-sharp. Supercool. There's glamour in the je ne sais quoi. Limited edition.

Hell gorgeous. I'm going to have to check out this holiday collection next time I go downtown. As flawless as she looks in this photo, I kind of wish it wasn't in black and white so that I could see the colors they used on her face. In addition to the usual shadows, brushes, lipcolor and powders, the collection also includes a perfume in a beautifully designed glass vial. Prices range from $20 (lipglass) to $75 (beaded clutch.) Ca-ching!

Excerpt from Alek Wek's Autobiography

Once, I landed at JFK after several modelling jobs in Europe. At immigration the homeland security officer looked me up and down and studied my passport with extra care. Not again, I thought. I’ve been detained so many times. I’ve come to realise that as a successful black woman – and a tall one at that – I represent something that triggers hostility and suspicion in a lot of people.

He sent me off to the little room they have for suspected terrorists, border jumpers and the like. I’d been there before. It’s like a jail in there. You can’t use your phone to call for assistance. They won’t tell you why you’re being detained.

They took my picture. They checked my green card again. They double-checked my fingerprints. They acted really tough, cold and suspicious. They kept me for 2½ hours.

I’d just flown business class from Frankfurt. I was wearing nice clothes, carrying a bag I’d designed, which even had a little brass tag with my name on it. I had all my papers. Yet still they had to detain me for all that time. Was it because I’m a black woman? I can’t prove it, but experience tells me that my skin figured in there somewhere.

A few weeks later the same guy detained me again. This time he grilled me about my travels. Why was I in Africa? Why had I been to Egypt? Why this? Why that?

“I’m a model. I travel for work.” He looked me up and down like he didn’t believe me. I wondered if Cindy Crawford had these kinds of issues. Another hour passed. I went up to him and told him I knew my rights.

“Your rights?” he said with a smirk. Finally, after 2½ hours, he stamped my passport.

“I thought you were Naomi Campbell,” one of the other officials said.

While I was waiting for my luggage a woman came up to me and said: “You know, you look just like this model. She’s from Africa. She’s got really short hair and she looks just like you.”

“Really?” I said.

“Really,” she said. “It’s amazing.”

I got in the car and put all the bad exchanges behind me. It’s the Dinka way.

Full excerpt from The Times Online

Alek Wek Opens Up About Exploitation in Modeling

Wek recounts the event in her soon to be published autobiography.

The calendar in question was made for Lavazza Italian coffee and showed the beauty against a giant coffee cup. Her flawless dark brown skin was to represent espresso. According to Fashion First, although she thought the images were beautiful she was uncomfortable with the manner in which her image was exploited. She says:

I can't help but compare them to all the images of black people that have been used in marketing over the decades. There was the big-lipped jungle-dweller on the blackamoor ceramic mugs sold in the Forties; the golliwog badges given away with jam; Little Black Sambo, who decorated the walls of an American restaurant chain in the 1960s; and Uncle Ben, whose apparently benign image still sells rice...

When asked by Vogue, the company CEO Ennio Ranaboldo defends the image which he saw artistic.

I think she raises a really interesting point. I remember when I first started seeing Alek in magazines. If my memories are correct, she was usually photographed alone and with rather exotic treatments. Never cast as straight forward beauty, she was usually regarded as some "exotic other." In fashion speak, this meant lots of feathers, body paint, sand, and usually a animal skin or two thrown in for good measure. When she finally appeared on the cover of Elle, I nearly fainted from delight.

Of course, the entire modeling industry is about exploitation but at the same time, I always hated reading mini-bios on Wek that made it sound like she tanning goat hides when the fashion world "discovered" her and put her on display. Iman got the same treatment when she first emerged. I actually remember someone telling me in all seriousness, that Iman was discovered while riding on the back of a giraffe in Africa (never mind which country.)

I'm interested to see what the response (if any) will be from the fashion industry with both Alek and Naomi's recent comments entering the blogosphere. Something tells me it will be business as usual, but I am pleased to see more people speaking out about these issues.

Pre-Order Alert!

Alek: From Sudanese Refugee to International Supermodel



Book Description

Since the day she was scouted by a modeling agent while shopping at a London street fair when she was just nineteen, Alek Wek's life has been nothing short of a fantasy. When she's not the featured model in print campaigns for hip companies, or gracing the cover of Elle, she is working the runways of Paris, New York, and Milan to model for the world's leading designers, including Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel. But nothing in her early years prepared her for the life of a model.

Born in Wau, in the southern Sudan, Alek knew only a few years of peace with her family before they were caught up in a ruthless civil war that pitted outlaw militias, the Muslim-dominated government, and southern rebels against each other in a brutal conflict that killed nearly two million people. Here is her daring story of fleeing the war on foot and her escape to London, where her rise from young model to supermodel was all the more notable because of Alek's non-European looks.

A probe into the Sudanese conflict and an inside look into the life of a most unique supermodel, Alek is a book that will inspire as well as inform.

I, for one, cannot wait to read this. I've always admired Alek's beauty, grace and charm but I know next to nothing about her life.

Pre-order from Amazon.com TODAY!!