LIKE NO OTHER Sometimes it takes a face and a voice as singular as Winnie Harlow’s to push fashion forward.
As fashion changes, sometimes it takes a face and a voice as singular as Winnie Harlow’s to push it forward.
She stands stoic under the boughs of a musty oak drooping with Spanish moss. Dressed in all white broderie anglaise, hair coiled into a halo plait, Winnie Harlow is facing off with the viewer backed by Beyoncé’s mournful building-to-powerful paean to her forbearers, Freedom. A milk-white antebellum house looms and Harlow, as strong as she stands, is trying to take it all in between takes for what became the singer’s visual album Lemonade.
“It was like a dream. I was trying to remind myself to live in the moment, because I kept thinking in my head in the future I’d be like: ‘ Wow, this is going to be amazing,’” she says. “Then I thought, ‘ No, it is amazing. Right now! Live right now. Remember this.’” The recollection is coming from 22-year-old Harlow, who’s speaking in a quiet moment during her visit to Australia. Being handpicked by Beyoncé was confirmation for the Toronto-born model that she wasn’t like many others. She was to appear alongside women who the singer considered truly significant, boundary breaking and rule rewriting.
But finding out how highly Beyoncé regarded her came via a photograph: pinned to a mood board on set for the video in New Orleans under the heading “Influential Women” was her own face. A phone call she’d received days earlier had her thinking she was needed as perhaps just an extra. “[Beyoncé’s] assistant called me and was like: ‘So, we’re working on a project and Beyoncé wants you to come,’” she says. “I literally got no explanation, just ‘can you come?’ Sure. Of course!”
Meeting the model now, a striking duality becomes apparent. At first it’s between an outward strength of conviction and an innocent enthusiasm (rare is the person unmarred by cynicism that strikes so often in the fashion industry). Then there’s the vocal social media persona that sees her standing up for issues she’s passionate about that’s countered by her softness and humour in person. In sneakers and off-duty jersey and denim, she never forces a laugh or a smile, though both come frequently. Finally, there’s her name. Born Chantelle Brown-Young, the model selected the name Winnie Harlow for herself, a persona that embodies everything she’s on her path to becoming – a tenacious, live-spark second self she likens to Beyoncé’s Sasha Fierce.
She also has something the majority of models don’t. At four years old, Harlow was diagnosed with vitiligo, a skin condition that causes depigmentation, which has given her two distinct skin tones. It’s what got her bullied through school and exactly what makes the model as uniquely beautiful as she is. Since working with Beyoncé, her singular look has been lent to Swarovski as an ambassador,
featured in Teen Vogue, been on the cover of Wonderland magazine and appeared on the red carpet at the 2016 MTV Video Music Awards as part of Beyoncé’s entourage. Before that, she picked up contracts for Desigual and Diesel and appeared in editorials for i-D, L’Officiel and Dazed and Confused, among others.
To say she’s accumulated these modelling plaudits because of her skin would be off the mark, as it would to tie her success to the Beyoncé apparatus. Harlow has jet eyes, like someone has dropped a bulb of ink into water, taut lithe limbs, broad-arched eyebrows and narrow cheekbones. To speak with Harlow is to understand another facet of beauty standards in an industry that for so long has relied on exclusion. Instead of preserving an inner sanctum of acceptance to maintain its mystique and cachet, Harlow’s generation is opening fashion’s eyes up to new aesthetics and a whole new way of looking at things – though for her, challenging traditional beauty notions isn’t a fad, nor should it be forced.
“I feel like everything [happens] in due time,” she says. “Everything that happens is also a part of history and while it’s so iconic to see certain people doing certain things, if everything were to happen at one time, those things wouldn’t be iconic.” Her maturity in matters like this she says she owes to starting modelling young, aged 16, and leaving school early a year later to instead study psychology, where she met adult students. “I feel so young around people who are older; you’re kind of in a place of fitting in,” she says. Modelling, then, was “an easy transition”, one that her mother, a salon owner, supported from the outset.
“I don’t think anyone really understood what I was doing. My mum just kind of supported me, blindly,” she remembers. “She said: ‘Who am I to tell my child not to live their dreams?’” Her father, who lived away from her and her two sisters and four brothers growing up, wasn’t as convinced. “My dad would call me and be like: ‘What are you talking about? You need to be in the military. What is this modelling?’” she says, laughing. “Dad said: ‘Modelling is a one in a million thing,’ and Mum replied: ‘Well, my daughter is one in a million. She could be the next Oprah, she could be the next this,’ and I was like: ‘Yes, Mum!’”
Something that makes her uncomfortable is the idea of being made a spokesperson. Harlow is a model. Full stop. A post on Instagram, a platform on which she continually engages with her followers, sets out her feelings: “Clarification:” one post begins. “I am not a ‘vitiligo spokesperson’. Stop trying to pin that on me. I have vitiligo and I am confident. That doesn’t make me the spokesperson for vitiligo. Just because a black person is confident, doesn’t make them a Negro spokesperson. I am a 21-year-old who looks beyond that box that people are trying to place me in … and that’s pretty much it on that topic.”
This stance is similar to how she feels about other issues she’s spoken out about, including cultural appropriation, equality and the Black Lives Matter movement. “I don’t feel pressure to talk about anything or be a role model or any of those things,” she says, acknowledging she does deal with a certain level of expectation. “People have such an idea of who I am and what I stand for just based on looking at me, and people make a lot of assumptions. I literally just am myself, and that’s it. If I feel like talking about it, then I will for sure, but I don’t feel pressure.”
Harlow is manoeuvring away from the traditional model career moves. She broke the mould appearing on America’s Next Top Model as the first Canadian ever allowed on the show, owing to host Tyra Banks personally requesting her. This came from some savvy social media orchestration from Harlow, who asked all her followers to tag Banks in her own photos on Instagram while her sister managed her Facebook page. After she was eliminated, photographer Nick Knight came calling, asking her to fly to London to shoot her for SHOWStudio. “I’d never been to London before and I was Googling who Nick was and I was like: ‘Holy shit. Oh, my God,’ and I was like: ‘Yeah, of course, sure.’ Then things just started rolling,” she recalls, adding she was put off modelling after reality television skewed her idea of what the job involved. “Once I’d experienced all those things [with Knight], I was like: ‘Oh, this is what modelling is,’” she says.
Today she’s dealing with the trappings of increased exposure. Fitting in family and friends is a balancing act – “I just never make promises” – and she’s had to put French lessons and ballet on hold. Her long-term view involves a Vogue cover and she’s circumspect about being locked into modelling. “I don’t have a be all and end all, and if something sparks my imagination or my heart, I’ll grab that. I could just drop it all and become a mother.”
Idols? She doesn’t have any, but she sure knows a lot of them. Jay-Z and Puff Daddy frequent her Instagram. Rihanna is a friend, as is fellow Canadian Drake, who raps about her in Know Yourself (“Reps up is in here: I got P Reign and Chubby and TJ and Winnie and whoa!”). She’s concentrating now on forging her voice, fronting up to the issues and facing up to a future where beauty standards aren’t dictated by a dominant force. On her most recent Instagram posts she can be seen standing up for her own followers who were the target of vitriol after mimicking Harlow’s look using make-up. “It is very clear to me when someone is showing love and I appreciate these people recreating, loving and broadcasting something to the world that once upon a time I cried myself to sleep over,” she says, signing off with “#1LOVE”.
One love and only one Winnie.