Finding her feet
How an Adelaide schoolgirl became Saint Laurent’s most wanted and where she’s heading next.
When you lock down an exclusive to walk for Saint Laurent, particularly while it’s going through an incredibly buzzy time, you wouldn’t want a single thing to go wrong. “I couldn’t put heels on,” says 17-year-old Adelaide-based model Adut Akech. She was in Paris and had just come off a 24-hour flight from Australia straight to fittings and she had a serious problem with her foot, at least for walking in a poker-straight slink worthy of the French house. “I didn’t wear socks on the plane. No-one told me that your feet get swollen!” she says.
“Every day [the Saint Laurent team] said: ‘ We’ll see you tomorrow, we’ll see you tomorrow for your fitting.’ And I was like: ‘Okay, they haven’t even confirmed me.’ Then I was there every day until the show.” While Akech was making her international debut, Anthony Vaccarello was making his at Saint Laurent as its newly appointed creative director. The designer wanted the model so much he booked her as an exclusive, a much-coveted post and often the start of a swift rise for many modelling careers.
What could have made matters worse was that Akech was travelling alone, although by choice: for the foreseeable future modelling is what she’s putting her mind to. “I wanted to get used to it, because I know that in the future my mum won’t be able to travel with me, so I’d just rather get into it now.”
Was she worried she was going to get cut from the Saint Laurent show? “I thought they were going to cut me, but they were really nice. They just did everything in their power. Literally at the last minute, the shoes got changed for my outfit because they said: ‘We’d rather you were comfortable than go out there and people can tell that you’re in pain.’” It’s impressive considering she’s still in high school. “I don’t really have any free time, so whatever time I have I use it to catch up on schoolwork.” Akech is the daughter of South Sudanese parents who raised her in Kenya until she was five, when they uprooted and moved to Adelaide. “I didn’t want to leave my cousins and everyone I grew up with, but I got used to Australia pretty quickly,” she says.
Captured here in her hometown for the Adelaide Fashion Festival, Akech’s languid stature, arresting soft eyes and short hair speak to the broader lean in fashion toward unique beauties rather than cookie-cutter runway clones. Happily, model agents at Chadwick recognised this and booked her on the spot when she walked into their Melbourne office early last year. Akech is part of a cohort of Sudanese-Australian models, including Duckie Thot and Adau Mornyang, breaking out, and Ajak Deng before them. Since then she’s been working hard, walking more shows than any other model at Australian fashion week last year.
The model’s self-awareness could serve to be one of her greatest assets going forward. “Seeing that I’m Sudanese especially, I’m becoming a role model to a lot of young girls,” she observes. “I get 10 messages a day on Instagram always asking for advice: ‘What’s it like being a black model in the industry?’” she says. “I grew up looking up to people like Alek Wek and Lupita [ Nyong’o]. I always aspired to be like them and now …” she trails off. Now, she’s well on her way to blazing her own way to the top.