Home » Latest » Celebrity » 10 Unusual Models In The Fashion Industry

10 Unusual Models In The Fashion Industry

8

28 0 Celebrity

7.8

SaveSavedRemoved 2

Ten models are rewriting the rulebook on what “runway ready” is supposed to look like.

For decades, the fashion industry ran on a narrow template: tall, thin, symmetrical, uniform. TheThings Celebrity’s video profile “10 Unusual Models In The Fashion Industry” runs through the men and women who blew that template up — models with vitiligo, Down syndrome, albinism, disabilities, and gender identities that don’t fit the old casting sheet, all of whom booked real campaigns, real runway slots, and real magazine covers anyway. Their stories track the industry’s slow, visible shift toward casting people who actually look different from one another.

• Winnie Harlow, diagnosed with vitiligo at age four, became a global ambassador for Desigual and Diesel after her run on America’s Next Top Model in 2014, later appearing in Beyoncé’s 2016 visual album “Lemonade.”
• Madeline Stuart became the world’s first professional catwalk model with Down syndrome in 2015, walking New York Fashion Week for FTL Moda and signing commercial deals with Manifesta and everMaya.
• Erika Ervin, who models professionally as Amazon Eve, holds the Guinness World Record for tallest professional model at 6 feet 8 inches.

Winnie Harlow Turns a Skin Condition Into a Career

Chantelle Brown-Young, better known by her stage name Winnie Harlow, was bullied over her vitiligo growing up in Toronto before turning that same condition into her signature. Her 2014 appearance on America’s Next Top Model introduced her to a national audience, and the bookings that followed — Desigual, Diesel — treated her patchwork skin tone as the selling point rather than something to retouch out. By the time she appeared in Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” in 2016, Harlow had gone from reality-show contestant to one of the most recognizable faces in fashion.

Madeline Stuart Walks Into New York Fashion Week

Madeline Stuart’s rise started in Australia in 2015, when photos of her modeling went viral and led to an invitation to walk in New York Fashion Week for designer FTL Moda. She became the first professional catwalk model with Down syndrome, and the bookings didn’t stop at one show — she went on to sign commercial contracts with brands including Manifesta and everMaya, building an actual modeling career rather than a one-time headline.

Gender and Height Break the Old Rules

Andreja Pejić built a career that most agencies wouldn’t have known how to categorize a decade earlier, walking in both menswear and womenswear campaigns at the highest levels of fashion before publicly coming out as a transgender woman. Erika Ervin took a different route to standing out: at 6 feet 8 inches, she’s recognized by Guinness World Records as the tallest professional model working today, a height that once would have gotten a model turned away at casting.

Erika Ervin — professionally known as Amazon Eve — stands 6 feet 8 inches tall, a Guinness World Record for tallest professional model.

Molly Bair, scouted in 2014, climbed to high-fashion runway status for major couture houses on the strength of features that don’t match the traditional model mold — a tall, slender frame paired with an unconventional face that designers wanted specifically because it wasn’t generic.

Faces That Don’t Look Like the Old Casting Sheet

The original industry roundup behind this video also points to models who pushed past disability, size, and visible-difference stigma to book real work: a transgender model with a disability who’s landed brand campaigns, a plus-size male model working with major retailers, a plus-size cover model who’s become a body-positivity fixture, an albino model who’s walked for the biggest houses in the business, and models with muscular dystrophy and visible facial birthmarks who’ve shot for major publications. None of them fit the industry’s old sample-size, symmetrical-face template, and all of them got booked anyway.

That’s the throughline across all ten profiles: casting directors who once would have passed on any of these models are now the ones seeking them out, precisely because a runway full of interchangeable faces stopped selling clothes the way a runway with Winnie Harlow or Madeline Stuart on it does.