“When I went blind, I lost any friends that I had.”
Those words pierced me like a dagger when I read them in Natasha Bruno’s interview with fashion and beauty influencer Molly Burke (“Bright Light,” page 48). The Oakville, Ont., native was legally blind by age 14, and if ever there was a time when a person needed a friend, it was then. But teenagers can be cruel. And not just teens, as we have all become very aware thanks to recent events.
Burke found a way to turn a deficit into a strength, and today she has more than 850K Instagram followers and almost two million subscribers to her YouTube channel. Her fans connect to see her beauty tutorials and get a peek inside her life as a blind woman. And unlike some who have spent much of their quarantining barefaced, Burke has stuck to her hair and makeup routine—to “feel normal.” There is so much that isn’t normal right now. For starters, this edition of FASHION is digital-only so we can make it available to more of you and with greater ease. You might be reading this on Apple News+ or as a downloadable flipbook from fashionmagazine.com. Whichever way you have found us, we are grateful that you are here.
We also had to bend the way we created some of the art for this issue. My image on this page was photographed well before the lockdown, as was our beauty spread, “Shy & Mighty” (page 40). But the rest of our fashion shoot pages were not. We reached out to award-winning
FASHION contributor Chris Nicholls, who was holed up with his family in Toronto. Luckily, his wife, Lorca Moore, who works with Nicholls as a highly skilled post-production artist, is also a professional model. She has appeared in
FASHION many times—the first cover the couple worked on together was Winter 1995, and four years later, Nicholls photographed Moore when she was pregnant with their son, Alden. The family’s backyard and roof were turned into the set for “Light Show” (page 52), and daughter Finlay, who is also a model, joined in. Nicholls, Lorca, Alden and Finlay are donating their fees for this story to the Black Legal Action Centre in Toronto and Fair Fight in the United States.
Plans to photograph our cover star, Antoni Porowski, for “Taste Maker” (page 62) also became a puzzle. He was stranded in Austin, Tex., where he was filming Queer Eye. On the plus side, he was a “he,” so we didn’t have to worry about not having a makeup artist on set. Clothes from Dior, Louis Vuitton and other brands were shipped to our creative and fashion director George Antonopoulos’s condo, where he styled the looks, shot everything (so Porowski would know how to put the items together) and then repacked the pieces and sent them south. A big thank you to Porowski for being such a great sport—unpacking and prepping the clothes, doing FaceTime “fittings” and taking direction, including for his hair, from afar. Kudos, too, to Austin photographer Ashlee Huff, who shot Porowski from a distance and without the usual technical crew.
We are continuing to work with sensitivity to COVID19 restrictions as well as to the rising awareness of racism in our society. You will find lists of black-owned fashion and beauty businesses to support on fashionmagazine.com, and we are delving further into conversations with those business owners. As a brand whose mission statement is #FASHIONforall, we will push harder to create a world that is a #safespaceforall.