The world at Adut Akech’s feet
SA’s own supermodel Adut Akech hasn’t put a foot wrong since exploding on to the scene — she talks racism, mental health and about an unexpected phone call from the Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle.
South Australian supermodel Adut Akech hasn’t put a foot wrong since making her international runway debut week three years ago.
But she almost didn’t strut for Saint Laurent at Paris Fashion Week on that September day in 2016. The girl with the gap-toothed smile and long legs from Adelaide’s north had just walked at Melbourne Fashion Week, the annual event for which she is the 2019 face.
But while she is now a globetrotter, then no one had thought to tell the 16-year-old to wear compression tights on her first international flight in a decade.
She arrived with a “humungous” foot, which had also become infected thanks to a piece of glass.
“I spent my first eight hours in Paris at the hospital,” Akech, now 19, recalls. “I could not walk … I was crying that they were going to cut me from the show.”
But after speaking up about the pain of wearing “the hardest high heels to walk in that I have worn in my life”, a solution was found – and Akech stepped out in Saint Laurent men’s brogues.
“I had my shoes changed very last minute – one foot was a size 38 the other a 41 – but I did the show … and that was the start of my international career,” Akech laughs.
She looked the epitome of style.
To quote Vogue Australia editor-in-chief Edwina McCann, she is “the biggest fashion superstar in the world”. But the tale of the shoe is just one example of the adaptability that is one of Akech’s hallmarks.
Born on Christmas Day, 1999, as her family made their way from war-torn South Sudan to Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, Akech came to Australia as a six-year-old, settling in Adelaide’s northern suburbs in Andrews Farm.
“It’s hard for anyone to have to move – I missed my life back in Kenya but I was also looking forward to coming here and the main reason was I wanted to go to school,” she says.
“Growing up here it wasn’t easy, but it was definitely easier than in Kenya. We had a roof over our heads, food to eat and somewhere to sleep, which was enough for us, but we still had to work hard.”
But the child refugee, who was desperate for an education, encountered ignorance early on.
“We faced a little bit of racism,” she says, diplomatically. “We just felt like we were excluded and not as welcome at first, but I learnt to grow a thicker skin and not let things get to me. I stand up for myself. I don’t let anybody bully me.”
But Akech recognises racism is entrenched. “This whole racism thing is not going anywhere,” she says. “I still experience it to this day in Australia and other countries.
“‘Go back to your f..king country’ … it’s so sad that someone will pull up next to you while you’re driving, wind down the window just to say such things to you. It’s disgusting.”
One of seven children raised by her single mother Mary, Akech has helped care for her siblings and feels much older than her years.
“I’m just an old soul in a young girl’s body. I feel extremely old,” she says.
“I can’t say exactly how old, but I don’t feel as if I’m 19. I definitely don’t live a 19-year-old’s lifestyle.
“My upbringing, the way I was raised and what I’ve gone though – I had to take on responsibilities from a young age and that matured me very quickly. I didn’t have any time to fool around and be a normal teenager.”
But Akech is grateful because the modelling industry “forces you to grow up pretty fast”.
“It had me prepared for the job that I do now,” she says.
That maturity, and Akech’s adaptability, put her on the path to her career and ranking as influential industry website models.com’s No. 1 model in the world.
She made her debut as a 12-year-old, when her aunt, who owned a boutique, asked her to be in a parade. Three years later Akech was on the books of small Adelaide agency Rin Models, which represents models from non-caucasian backgrounds.
But after a year she decided it was time for a change and walked into Chadwick Models while visiting relatives in Melbourne in April, 2016.
“Chadwick Models took me on from the minute that they saw me,” Akech says.
Within weeks she had made her debut at Sydney’s Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Australia and set a record for a newcomer, walking 16 shows, equalled the following year by another South Sudanese South Australian model, Akiima.
Also signed with Elite worldwide and The Society in New York, Akech was in demand, walking at Melbourne Fashion Week, two days after which she was on her way to Paris.
“And from Saint Laurent it’s just been non-stop for the past three years,” Akech says.
Determined to finish Year 12 at St Columba College, she graduated in 2017, attending her formal, like any other Adelaide schoolgirl, in a dress from popular hire boutique ONS when she could have been dressed in couture from any of the world’s leading fashion houses.
Based in New York for the past two years, Akech has walked for virtually all of them, including Chanel.
Last year she was chosen by the legendary Karl Lagerfeld to be the Chanel bride in the French fashion house’s couture show in Paris.
The casting made global headlines. Akech is the second black model to be a Chanel bride, the first being one of her childhood idols, Alek Wek, in 2004.
Akech became a muse for the late Lagerfeld before his death in February this year. He even gave her a nickname after his famous beloved Birman cat Choupette Lagerfeld.
There was also a big cat photoshoot with “a real live panther … I got to pat it” for a Valentino campaign, a year before Akech made history again when she became the face of the Italian fashion house’s Born in Roma fragrance.
“Being the first black girl to be the face of such a high-end fragrance was a special moment,” Akech says. “I think everything I do is a pinch-me moment.”
The latest is appearing on the cover of the “Forces for Change” September issue of British Vogue, guest edited by Meghan Markle. The honour – shared with 14 other women including New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and US actor and activist Jane Fonda – was a surprise for Akech who had been photographed by Peter Lindbergh for what was then a mystery project.
“Edward had texted me and told me he had a surprise,” Akech says of the British Vogue editor-in-chief Edward Enninful, who contacted her late last month two days before the edition launched.
Then at midnight she answered a phone call from a UK number and spoke to a female asking if she was speaking to Adut.
“I said, ‘Hi, who is this?’ and she said, ‘It’s me, Meghan ... sorry I’ve taken this long to speak to you’,” Akech says. “She said I was an ‘inspirational young lady’ and ‘it made perfect sense to have you be a part of this’.
“It was a nice conversation. I was not expecting it at all. How many people get a phone call from the Duchess of Sussex? I’ve been a fan of hers for a while, so when she called me I was freaking out.
“To be recognised as one of those 15 (trailblazing women) is something I will take to the grave with me. No one can ever take these moments away from me.”
Thrilled by the recognition, there was a time when Akech was reluctant to embrace her supermodel-turned-role-model status.
“I was in denial about it, I suppose, but at some point I started accepting that I am somewhat of a role model to a lot of young girls and boys who are trying to pursue a career in modelling,” she says.
“When I was growing up, I had my mother as a role model and when I wanted to model (it was) Naomi Campbell, so it’s nice to know that somebody looks up to me. I feel like I have a responsibility to strive for greatness because these little kids don’t have a voice … I’m kind of doing it for those little girls and boys.”
At last year’s The Business of Fashion VOICES conference in Oxfordshire, Akech said: “I will always be a refugee, because that’s who I am”. It’s a view that sees her committed to working with the United Nations to support refugees and her birthplace, Kakuma refugee camp.
She plans to travel to Kenya for a TED talk early next year in what will be her first visit since leaving as a child.
“I went back to Africa a few months ago,” she says, referring to a visit to Cameroon for a joint project between Prada and National Geographic.
“It was the greatest feeling ever to be back in my motherland and I’m looking forward to going back.”
Akech also grasps every opportunity to return to her family, who are her support system which also includes a “very small circle” of friends.
On New Year’s Day this year she wrote a telling message to her then 270,000 Instagram followers (she now has more than 490,000 followers, no doubt, greatly influenced by the “Markle effect”). In the post, Akech revealed she had “suffered from really bad depression and anxiety for a while now”, urging anyone with a mental health condition to seek help.
“It was very hard for me to open up and talk to someone about it but once I did it was probably the biggest relief of my life,” Akech now says.
“I think that is something I have had for a few years now, but I just never knew it, and when everything started getting too much with work and things that were happening in my personal life, I think that’s when I realised I had problems and needed help because I didn’t feel like myself. I know myself and thought ‘something’s off with me’. That was at the beginning of last year.”
Akech has since cut back on her workload. “I have some ‘me time’, whether I go to therapy, the gym, hang out with my friends and get myself back on track to my normal self,” she says.
“When I feel like it’s all getting too much I come home (to Adelaide) … my family help me when I feel like it’s too much and I can’t bear this and I feel like I’m going to have a mental breakdown.
“My siblings are enough of a vacation for me. I would choose to come home and be with my family over going somewhere sunny and lying on the beach with my friends.”
While reluctant to call it a “meltdown”, Akech recently recognised the need to “take a moment”.
“Everything that’s happened in the last three years finally caught up with me,” she says.
“I’ve been home in Australia for almost two months, which is the longest break I’ve had, and I missed out on a lot of work, but it was very important that I did that for myself.
“Now I’m back on my feet. I’m 100 per cent and I’m ready to go back to work.”
And Akech says modelling is hard work behind the glamorous facade.
“It’s not easy at all and there are times when I feel like ‘today I don’t want to get out of bed and I don’t want to go to the shoot’, but I think that’s with any job,” she says.
“There is nothing that has been handed to me … everything I’ve got I’ve had to work for it. Probably the hardest decision I have ever made in my life was to move to New York to pursue my dream – to leave my family behind and start a completely new life. That wasn’t easy, but it’s all paying off.”
She is used to comments like, “I bet you’re so rich and making so much money”. While Akech says not all her assignments are paid, she agrees her earnings have changed her family’s life.
“When we first came to Australia, I made a promise to my mum that I was going to finish school and buy her a house and a car, and make something of myself. And, at 19, I’m proud to say that I have,” Akech says, adding the car and house were birthday presents.
But, gifts aside, Akech says she leaves “Adut the model” behind whenever she returns to home to Adelaide, doing all the normal things with her mum and siblings such as going to the movies, for walks and out for lunch and dinner together.
They will be taking a holiday together, to see her as a family for the first time on the runway at Melbourne Fashion Week.
“It’s been a while since I did any Australian fashion weeks,” Akech says. “I probably did all of them in 2016 and then didn’t do any up until now.
“The last time my mum saw me walk a show was at the Adelaide Fashion Festival in 2016 – it’s been years.”
After Melbourne Fashion Week and a quick trip to Adelaide “to say goodbye to my family”, Akech will return to the US for New York Fashion Week and then complete the international runway circuit in London, Milan and Paris.
And each time she comes full circle she sees diversity being increasingly embraced.
“In my very first big show, when I did Saint Laurent, there were no black girls … I was the only black girl in that show,” she says. “Now when I do Saint Laurent there’s not only black girls, there’s Asian girls, girls from all around the world.
“Australia was definitely behind, but it’s nice to know that I am somebody who opened a door for a lot of girls because now there are so many more girls from so many places who are in demand.
“It’s a great feeling to be a part of this movement and have some positive impact.”
Melbourne Fashion Week, August 28–September 5, with more than 150 free and ticketed events, mfw.melbourne.vic.gov.au