SLICK WOODS

Model, muse and, soon, mother. Get ready to see fashion’s favourite rebel in a whole new light

WITH THAT CHARMING, GAP-TOOTH SMILE, shaved head and tattoos up and down her body, the 5ft 1Oin, 21-year-old supermodel is, unmistakably, Slick Woods. There is no one else in the industry – in any industry, really – quite like her; she has a distinctiveness and openness that has attracted an army of fans (including Rihanna, but more on that later), who love her for all that realness. But on a June day on the beach in New York, where she is shooting this issue’s cover, there’s one thing noticeably different about her: a fine white vest top reveals that Slick Woods is pregnant.

It’s a surprise, but what’s not a shock is how upfront she is about the whole thing – she unapologetically lives her life in the public eye. She tells me without hesitation that the baby is a boy (‘I saw my baby’s penis!’ she says of the sonogram), he will be called Saphir (a play on the September birthstone, the expected month of delivery), and was a happy surprise for both her and the father, model Adonis Bosso (‘My son’s going to be gorgeoussss,’ she says, showing me a picture of a shirtless Bosso). ‘I hear sob stories about baby daddy drama. Being 21 and my baby’s father being excited is just step one. There are girls who don’t even have that,’ she says. She will be breastfeeding. And singer Erykah Badu, a practising doula, will be her spiritual guide through childbirth. ‘She’s a mommy role model. A mother I look up to, who kills her shit and is a boss-ass bitch.’

Approaching motherhood has also made Slick optimistic about the future, and of the planet, which is not easy to do at a time when those leading the American government don’t even believe in global warming. ‘If you’ve never had hope for the future, you have to,’ she says. ‘You can create life; whatever you want that life to be. The more kids you have paying it forward, the more new ideas there will be. You have to get your army ready,’ she adds.

Slick hasn’t kept her pregnancy a secret – she told the world on Instagram in July – but she is weirded out that people would even care: ‘I wouldn’t walk down the street and scream, “I’m pregnant!”’ She wasn’t expecting to end up in a relationship with a man, either: before Bosso, she had been dating women. ‘I never thought I’d be with anyone like him,’ she says, vague about how she defines their relationship, but pointing out that she likes that they both maintain independence, with him living in LA and her in Brooklyn. She is also keeping the option open of one day being with a woman again: ‘With sexuality, when you are a public figure you have to pick a side, black or white. But I’m grey.’ Slick didn’t find out a baby was on the way until five months into her pregnancy – a result of an incorrect diagnosis of infertility given to her when she was young. ‘I was really, really, really sick in London, but thought it was because of travel, so a doctor gave me pills for flu. Went to Paris: more pills for flu. And then I went to LA, and they tried a sonogram, and I saw my baby’s face and heard his heartbeat,’ she says. ‘Tears of joy.’

I see these tears with my own eyes when we talk about the journey that has brought Slick here. It’s one of epic proportions, that has given her a preternatural sense of self. Born in Minneapolis, Slick Woods was not her birth name (that would be Simone Thompson), but one given to her later thanks to her skills rolling joints. Aged two, she moved to Venice Beach with her mother. At four, her mother was imprisoned for manslaughter and Slick was raised by her grandma. Then, her grandma got divorced and ‘lost everything’, leading to Slick, aged about seven, living between Minneapolis and LA, sometimes in motels and cars. ‘I didn’t have anything,’ she says. ‘You learn how to survive; to be OK with nothing. And you learn how to use the little energy you do have to give to the people who can’t survive having nothing, so they can keep going.’

Slick enrolled in Santa Monica High School, but dropped out at 17, spent time in jail at 18 and by 19 was using drugs pretty heavily. Then fate would call: she was living on the streets and waiting for a bus in LA when the model Ash Stymest spotted her, offered her weed and asked if she had ever modelled before. ‘I’m like, “I’m going to tase this n***a.” I didn’t trust him. I didn’t know if he was trying to make me a porn star.’ But he was serious. He had his agents come from New York to meet her and helped to get her career underway. In 2015, she booked her first real gig, in the lookbook for a little brand called Yeezy, designed by Kanye West.

Ever since, she’s attracted attention not just for her inimitable and refreshingly liberated sense of style, but her puckish attitude and personality, which is, to put it mildly, #nofilter, with about as many photos on her Instagram with a joint in hand as there are snaps of her on a catwalk. She’s come to represent the power of individuality and a symbol of what is left in these troubling times of the rusty American dream, but she’s not always comfortable with how her narrative is framed. ‘I have supporters who will tell me they follow me just for being myself. And that’s genuinely the reason I continued when I first started. I want people to be cool and comfortable with themselves,’ she says. ‘But when they’re misconstruing your message and balling it up, taking the idea to be, “Oh, I want to be just like Slick.” That’s the opposite of what I’m talking about.’

At the risk of oversimplifying, she’s a little bit to modelling what Rihanna is to music: an IDGAF icon who stays true to herself at every turn. Indeed, she and Rihanna are good friends, and Slick is the face of Fenty x PUMA (she even has ‘FENTY’ tattooed behind her ear in block letters). ‘[Rihanna] saw a photo of me on Instagram, found me, and we hit it off,’ she says. ‘You ever loved someone so much that every time you see them, you end up in tears somehow? She reminds me of my mother. Like, they’re the same person. I tell them they remind me of each other all the time.’

It’s high praise, as Slick puts her mother on a pedestal above all others. Though her mum is still in prison, they talk three times a day in approved 15-minute intervals. ‘We talk about everything – except modelling. She asks me how my day is. We don’t need to talk about magazines,’ she says. ‘Being a gang member, everybody expected her not to be the best mum. But my mum was very hands-on with me as a child. My mummy read to me in the womb. And she’s proud because she knows that everybody expected me to be exactly what she was. She went to prison when she was 19. I became a model at 19. And I can take care of my mother when she gets out.’

This brings us to the tears, which stream down Slick’s face when she discusses her child in relation to her own upbringing. ‘At 14, 15, I never expected to ever be giving any type of life; to be this happy with having a child. From not having family to being able to create your own,’ she says. ‘Things you lacked, things you missed out on, trauma – you can erase that by creating new life. All those things you didn’t get, all those hugs and kisses. I can retract those things with my son’s life. In giving him that childhood, it heals you as well. In hugging your son, it’s giving a piece of that back to you, too. I need him as much as he needs me.’

Before we say goodbye, Slick stops to think about the strength she can offer her child through her own vulnerability. Symbolised, she says, by that famous absence of hair on her head. Without long locks, she feels exposed to the world, without armour. ‘I don’t have anything to protect myself. It’s just like, I’m happy today or I’m sad today. And that’s OK,’ she says. ’I’m going to stand up for my son. I want him to feel proud as a black man. Everyone is telling men it’s wrong to express their feelings, but I will not let him feel like his feelings are wrong.’ It turns out that, in all of her hopes and fears and needs, in her desire to give her child a better life than she had, the most unique thing about Slick Woods is actually how comfortable she is being just like everybody else.

“With SEXUALITY, WHEN YOU ARE a PUBLIC FIGURE you HAVE to PICK a SIDE, BLACK or WHITE. BUT I’M GREY ”