Fashion’s new frontier: a modelling agency for people of colour
Toronto-based Lorde Inc. scouts models from social media sites like Instagram and Tumblr
Forget glossy magazines, forget runways, forget Vogue, forget billboards with their fancy watch ads, forget whiteness as the norm. Meet the Internet. Meet Lorde Inc. The western fashion industry is a behemoth to penetrate, but 27-year-old Nafisa Kaptownwala is doing it from her living room at the corner of Niagara and Tecumseth Sts.
She is the founder of Lorde Inc., a modelling agency for people of colour, and it’s the first of its kind.
She started the agency in 2014, when she lived in London, England, following a conversation with a friend about the lack of diversity and unrealistic beauty standards in fashion.
The idea is that, “hey, if you’re having a hard time finding models of colour, well, now you don’t have an excuse. Here’s an agency for them,” explains Kaptownwala, crouched on a 1930s-style couch she got from an estate sale on Kijiji.
“But also for young girls who feel like they don’t have a place in the industry,
“If you’re having a hard time finding models of colour, well, now you don’t have an excuse.”
well, here you go, here’s a place for you.”
Kaptownwala’s apartment is adjacent to the studio she shares with several artist friends.
The workshop, in the basement of one of downtown Toronto’s last industrial buildings, is a white brick space filled with colourful sculptures and small messy desks.
But Kaptownwala does most of her work from the iMac sitting feet away from her.
“I think the way that we’re operating as a business is kind of on this new frontier of, one, how modelling agencies are run, but also just really taking advantage of the Internet and mobility,” she says.
Kaptownwala scouts Lorde models on Tumblr and Instagram, spotting beautiful people of colour who appear comfortable in front of a camera.
The battle doesn’t stop at “more models of colour,” she concedes.
“Although some of my models have been able to penetrate that industry to some extent, it’s always the more light-skin, more European-looking models.”
The 60 or so models signed with Lorde Inc. live in London, New York and, since Kaptownwala arrived last year, Toronto.
They’ve appeared in campaigns for Adidas, Vans and Little Burgundy, and the agency has already gained recognition from New York Magazine and Nylon Mag, among others.
Toronto, a city congratulated for its diversity and its fashion industry, has been the most difficult to penetrate for Lorde, says Kaptownwala.
Here, companies have had trouble acknowledging the industry and their own shortcomings, she says. “There’s white privilege, and yet no one here wants to talk about it.”
The concept for the agency came from conversations with friends in the fashion industry in Montreal, where Kaptownwala earned her bachelor of fine arts at Concordia University. They were conducting photo shoots that, despite their feminist angle, seldom featured people of colour. And still don’t, she said.
“I felt invisible,” Kaptownwala said, noting they’d said they couldn’t find models of colour to feature, even if they cast many from those around them instead of modelling agencies. “It was obvious that models of colour aren’t picking up on people’s radars.”
Movements such as Black Lives Matter have spurred conversations of diversity from police forces to the Oscars. Yet change has been slow.
In the spring, Australian label Misha was criticized for the closing of its runway show led by model Bella Hadid, strutting to Beyoncé’s “Formation,” an empowering anthem for blackness, with a bevy of other models. They were all white.
Western trends have repeatedly borrowed from other cultures without representing their people in ads and on runways.
White designers incorporating indigenous prints and traditionally black hairstyles have been accused of cultural appropriation and fetishism, two concepts Kaptownwala says are prevalent and harmful as they promote false notions of diversity.
So does tokenism, another prevalent issue, says Denise Cruz, associate professor of global fashion at the University of Toronto. Tokenism is when organizations include a minimum number of people of colour as a symbol of diversity, without making a meaningful effort.
“She’s much more interested in, I think, the longer ramifications of what it means . . . for people of colour to be in the fashion scene more regularly and not just as this kind of token object,” Cruz said.
Kaptownwala’s own reality informs her politics.
She grew up in a working class East Vancouver neighbourhood and was raised by her father. “Coming from a neighbourhood that’s almost entirely people of colour and then going to university — feeling othered is very real,” she said. “You start to realize how your experiences are very different from what’s normalized.”
Kaptownwala says she noticed a pattern of representation in fashion and media that follows political movements. In times of protest, like now, they appear more diverse. She wants to move beyond that, to a place where people of colour feel their beauty reflected in glossy magazines, too, and on runways, billboards and across the Internet.
“If there are very few models of colour that are being shot, how are young girls going to believe that they’re beautiful?” she said.