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'I went hungry, not to fit into a dress but because I was a refugee,' says model Alex Wek
by LOUETTE HARDING - More by this author »
Last updated at 14:38pm on 27th October 2007
Supermodel Alek Wek has graced the catwalks of Chanel and Galliano, but her early life
was blighted by hardship when she had to flee civil war in Sudan. Here she talks to YOU
about her life and how, having once nearly starved, she was shocked when told to lose
weight...
Alek Wek enters the studio on her flamingo legs, trailing the supermodel lifestyle behind
her in that walk - a drift of flashbulbs, airport lounges and five-star hotel rooms in the
fashion capitals.
Her looks are on the extreme edge of striking - stick-thin, six feet tall, incredible skin with
a velvety bloom.
Supermodel Alex Wek has graced the catwalks of Chanel and Galliano, but her early life
was marked by hardship growing up in Sudan
You can see exactly why an alert scout collared her in a park in South London when she
was 18, with the classic "you shall go to the ball" line, "Have you ever thought of
modelling as a career?"
Well, no, Alek hadn't.
In the first place because she had suffered from psoriasis (a skin condition) from infancy
until she landed in England, aged 14, an exile from the Sudanese civil war, shivering in
her one cotton dress and flip-flops.
(Perhaps because of the damp climate, her crippling 'lizard skin' condition cleared up
almost overnight.)
And, secondly, she'd already seen too much hardship and grief - too much real life - to be
impressed by glossy magazine glamour.
But once she decided to give it a go, glamour engulfed her anyway.
She has modelled for everyone from Galliano to Chanel. Her covers include American Elle,
her adverts Nars, Clarins and Revlon. Alek: Sudanese Refugee to International
Supermodel is the title of her new autobiography and it accurately sums up her story.
She has a toothy smile and genuine warmth; you'd have to be as sour as a dehydrated
lemon not to like her. We are meeting in New York, in Brooklyn, close to where she now
lives.
Though terrified by the Western practice of mortgaging, she obtained stability for the first
time since she was a small child by buying a house here.
After the purchase, Alek's redoubtable mother, Akuol, set forth to visit her, from Kilburn,
North London.
"She came to bless the house but I know her: it was to see what community I was living in.
"Was it safe? She doesn't like travelling but she said, 'I am coming, OK?'
"Now all my neighbours ask, 'When is she coming back?'" A big chuckle.
Alek, now 30, was the first black model who didn't conform to a Caucasian aesthetic, the
first with an uncompromising, sub-Saharan beauty. She belongs to the Dinka tribe and
grew up in a small town called Wau in the south of the Sudan, the seventh of nine children.
"I thought we were middle class," she says, of her upbringing in a two-bedroom house
without electricity or running water.
"But now, considering what middle class is in the West - wow! We were poor!"
She talks about her parents with huge affection.
"My father made sure of discipline but my mum, she was serious business."
Her 6ft 5in father, a civil servant, treated his womenfolk with a respect often lacking in
African machismo, and promoted his daughter's confidence.
"He walked me to school on my first day and I knew it was a special day because I had
never gone somewhere just me and him."
But her sense of security crumbled in the war.
"It put people against each other. Suddenly, you couldn't look at your neighbour in the
same way." She reaches for a Dinka metaphor, "It's like, one bad onion makes the whole
sack smell awful.
"From nine years old, I lived with fear. I saw our neighbours disappearing.
"I was scared that I would come home from school and my parents would not be there. I
still have dreams in which someone is coming to the door."
Teenage militias roared through the town, looting and killing as they blasted Michael
Jackson's Thriller from their speakers. Bodies lay in the grass and rotted.
"Bones inside clothes. That was war to me."
Shortly after their house had been sprayed with bullets while the terrified family cowered
inside, the Weks joined the line of refugees leaving town. They then trekked across the
bush to join cousins in the country, reverting to another century, to mud huts and a
complete lack of medicine.
Anarchy wrecked her father's health. He'd been due to have a routine operation to remove
metal pins from a hip broken when he fell off his bicycle.
Without it, infection set in. The family had to risk further travel, to Khartoum, but once
there discovered they didn't have the funds to pay for treatment.
"He didn't have to die like he did. Going through that whole ordeal, looking for safety,
made it worse...if only we could have done something before it became unbearable,
became agony. We didn't have the money to stop his pain. I feel very sad about it."
She is near to tears.
"It is important to have some sort of money, enough to be able to save a life."
Alek's elder sister was already in Hackney, East London, with her architect husband. She
applied for asylum for the family. Her father's application was refused and he died in 1991.
Alek and a younger sister came over first and it was to be two years before she saw her
mother again.
Despite the wrench of parting, she says, "It was the most wonderful moment of my life.
"There was a time when I didn't think we would ever enjoy safety again - until I came to
London. Then I felt I could be a young person and nobody would take that away from me."
The big miracle was her psoriasis clearing up in a matter of weeks.
"I was looking at myself in the mirror, so grateful.
"I had no scars, even after scratching it for years.
"That was an amazing moment, because the psoriasis terrorised me. It was agony. I would
scratch in my sleep. Wounds everywhere. I've got to keep my hands like this," she folds
her fingers into a protective ball.
"My mother is yelling at me, 'Open your hands or they'll stay that way and you're not going
to be able to do anything!'"
She holds up one misshapen finger which didn't heal correctly despite her mother's
efforts.
The psoriasis had set Alek apart and the pain was restricting. Suddenly, she was free of it.
"But it taught me not to take beauty too seriously," she adds.
Alek was studying for an art degree and scrubbing toilets at the BBC when she was
discovered.
Her biggest breaks came after she moved to New York a year later, aged 19. She was
unsophisticated but savvy, a virgin with no desire to join the decadent party.
She quickly realised that her industry saw her as new and exotic - a savage beauty - too
savage, in fact, to risk on a magazine cover. It says a lot for her poise that she's finagled
her way round this covert racism.
"Photographers wanted me to pose on leopard-print couches or with spears.
"I faced a kind of institutional racism within the fashion industry. I wanted to work with Karl
Lagerfeld but the people in Paris said I was too 'exotic'."
Told she was too fat, she again turned a deaf ear.
Back in the Sudan, families never ate more than two meals a day, and frequently only one.
But even there Alek was told she was too skinny.
"I'd nearly starved, literally, over the years, yet they were telling me I was too fat?
"This definitely is the model's curse and it's only worsened. I've known models starve
themselves for weeks to prepare for the catwalk.
"It's always clear when someone is hungry for a long time because they tend to become
depressed and listless.
"I've felt that, not because I needed to fit into a dress but because I was a refugee. I don't
ever want to feel like that again."
She "almost dropped out of modelling", at the very start and again, "in the middle of it all,
about five years in".
She bought her house, which she and her boyfriend of four years, Riccardo Sala, an Italian
who works in real estate, have just finished renovating.
She took up painting again as a hobby. And she started her handbag company, Wek 1933
(her father's birth year), "because I like the fact that in business you have to work with a
team and you need your brain".
Recently, she has campaigned for aid agencies such as Unicef and founded a
not-for-profit organisation educating underprivileged children. Modelling gave her the
profile to do this.
"So I've been lucky. I've made good friends, because there are some designers, stylists
and editors who realise fashion isn't that important.
"Now I model in moderation, which is much better.
"To be a supermodel alongside all these young girls? No way! I tell my nephews and
nieces that modelling is not so glamorous.
"I say to the girls, 'Nothing should change your soul'.
"And they get it. They're happy finishing their schooling. I say, 'How successful you are is
how at ease you feel in your own shoes'."
Ah, shoes. The shoes Alek came in are old moccasins, pulled on with a pink shirt and
jeans. The shoes for the shoot are vertiginous spikes.
"My boyfriend says he loves to see me like this," she says, tottering in sequins and full
slap.
"Tuh! Like I'm going out for the groceries dressed like this!"
The photographer asks her to move and twirl but, if anything, Alek grows more stationary.
There's something vulnerable, slightly gawky about her - a throwback to models like
Twiggy. It's as if she lacks the necessary self-regard.
And note the things she hasn't fixed.
Her teeth are brilliantly white - a good advert, she chuckles, for Sudanese dental hygiene,
which consisted of daily cleaning with a stick and powdered cow dung - but they are gappy
and one projects forwards slightly.
She was never going to be an identikit beauty, of course, but it takes some strength not to
conform to the general details.
And the future, after modelling?
"If it was up to my boyfriend, we would have a kid today," she says.
Or up to her mother, who fears Alek will leave it too late and have to satisfy her maternal
urges by adopting.
"Having or getting a child is not the hardest part; raising the child is the hard part," she
says, repeating one of her mother's aphorisms.
"If I could get just a bit of my mother's wisdom - even in exile, she's at peace," Alek sighs.
She suffers odd moments of disassociation.
Once, at JFK airport, she was watching TV footage of Sierra Leone, "a long line of
dark-skinned people fleeing their homes".
Observing her fellow passengers, chatting on phones, tapping on laptops, she was
stricken by loneliness.
"I felt closer to the refugees than I did to the privileged travellers whose class I had
somehow joined."
Born: 16 April
Where: Sudan
Height: 180 cm
Bust: 86 cm
Waist: 59 cm
Hips: 88 cm
CLICK HERE TO SEE HER PORTFOLIO
CLICK HERE FOR MORE SUPERMODEL
THINSPIRATION
by LOUETTE HARDING - More by this author »
Last updated at 14:38pm on 27th October 2007
Supermodel Alek Wek has graced the catwalks of Chanel and Galliano, but her early life
was blighted by hardship when she had to flee civil war in Sudan. Here she talks to YOU
about her life and how, having once nearly starved, she was shocked when told to lose
weight...
Alek Wek enters the studio on her flamingo legs, trailing the supermodel lifestyle behind
her in that walk - a drift of flashbulbs, airport lounges and five-star hotel rooms in the
fashion capitals.
Her looks are on the extreme edge of striking - stick-thin, six feet tall, incredible skin with
a velvety bloom.
Supermodel Alex Wek has graced the catwalks of Chanel and Galliano, but her early life
was marked by hardship growing up in Sudan
You can see exactly why an alert scout collared her in a park in South London when she
was 18, with the classic "you shall go to the ball" line, "Have you ever thought of
modelling as a career?"
Well, no, Alek hadn't.
In the first place because she had suffered from psoriasis (a skin condition) from infancy
until she landed in England, aged 14, an exile from the Sudanese civil war, shivering in
her one cotton dress and flip-flops.
(Perhaps because of the damp climate, her crippling 'lizard skin' condition cleared up
almost overnight.)
And, secondly, she'd already seen too much hardship and grief - too much real life - to be
impressed by glossy magazine glamour.
But once she decided to give it a go, glamour engulfed her anyway.
She has modelled for everyone from Galliano to Chanel. Her covers include American Elle,
her adverts Nars, Clarins and Revlon. Alek: Sudanese Refugee to International
Supermodel is the title of her new autobiography and it accurately sums up her story.
She has a toothy smile and genuine warmth; you'd have to be as sour as a dehydrated
lemon not to like her. We are meeting in New York, in Brooklyn, close to where she now
lives.
Though terrified by the Western practice of mortgaging, she obtained stability for the first
time since she was a small child by buying a house here.
After the purchase, Alek's redoubtable mother, Akuol, set forth to visit her, from Kilburn,
North London.
"She came to bless the house but I know her: it was to see what community I was living in.
"Was it safe? She doesn't like travelling but she said, 'I am coming, OK?'
"Now all my neighbours ask, 'When is she coming back?'" A big chuckle.
Alek, now 30, was the first black model who didn't conform to a Caucasian aesthetic, the
first with an uncompromising, sub-Saharan beauty. She belongs to the Dinka tribe and
grew up in a small town called Wau in the south of the Sudan, the seventh of nine children.
"I thought we were middle class," she says, of her upbringing in a two-bedroom house
without electricity or running water.
"But now, considering what middle class is in the West - wow! We were poor!"
She talks about her parents with huge affection.
"My father made sure of discipline but my mum, she was serious business."
Her 6ft 5in father, a civil servant, treated his womenfolk with a respect often lacking in
African machismo, and promoted his daughter's confidence.
"He walked me to school on my first day and I knew it was a special day because I had
never gone somewhere just me and him."
But her sense of security crumbled in the war.
"It put people against each other. Suddenly, you couldn't look at your neighbour in the
same way." She reaches for a Dinka metaphor, "It's like, one bad onion makes the whole
sack smell awful.
"From nine years old, I lived with fear. I saw our neighbours disappearing.
"I was scared that I would come home from school and my parents would not be there. I
still have dreams in which someone is coming to the door."
Teenage militias roared through the town, looting and killing as they blasted Michael
Jackson's Thriller from their speakers. Bodies lay in the grass and rotted.
"Bones inside clothes. That was war to me."
Shortly after their house had been sprayed with bullets while the terrified family cowered
inside, the Weks joined the line of refugees leaving town. They then trekked across the
bush to join cousins in the country, reverting to another century, to mud huts and a
complete lack of medicine.
Anarchy wrecked her father's health. He'd been due to have a routine operation to remove
metal pins from a hip broken when he fell off his bicycle.
Without it, infection set in. The family had to risk further travel, to Khartoum, but once
there discovered they didn't have the funds to pay for treatment.
"He didn't have to die like he did. Going through that whole ordeal, looking for safety,
made it worse...if only we could have done something before it became unbearable,
became agony. We didn't have the money to stop his pain. I feel very sad about it."
She is near to tears.
"It is important to have some sort of money, enough to be able to save a life."
Alek's elder sister was already in Hackney, East London, with her architect husband. She
applied for asylum for the family. Her father's application was refused and he died in 1991.
Alek and a younger sister came over first and it was to be two years before she saw her
mother again.
Despite the wrench of parting, she says, "It was the most wonderful moment of my life.
"There was a time when I didn't think we would ever enjoy safety again - until I came to
London. Then I felt I could be a young person and nobody would take that away from me."
The big miracle was her psoriasis clearing up in a matter of weeks.
"I was looking at myself in the mirror, so grateful.
"I had no scars, even after scratching it for years.
"That was an amazing moment, because the psoriasis terrorised me. It was agony. I would
scratch in my sleep. Wounds everywhere. I've got to keep my hands like this," she folds
her fingers into a protective ball.
"My mother is yelling at me, 'Open your hands or they'll stay that way and you're not going
to be able to do anything!'"
She holds up one misshapen finger which didn't heal correctly despite her mother's
efforts.
The psoriasis had set Alek apart and the pain was restricting. Suddenly, she was free of it.
"But it taught me not to take beauty too seriously," she adds.
Alek was studying for an art degree and scrubbing toilets at the BBC when she was
discovered.
Her biggest breaks came after she moved to New York a year later, aged 19. She was
unsophisticated but savvy, a virgin with no desire to join the decadent party.
She quickly realised that her industry saw her as new and exotic - a savage beauty - too
savage, in fact, to risk on a magazine cover. It says a lot for her poise that she's finagled
her way round this covert racism.
"Photographers wanted me to pose on leopard-print couches or with spears.
"I faced a kind of institutional racism within the fashion industry. I wanted to work with Karl
Lagerfeld but the people in Paris said I was too 'exotic'."
Told she was too fat, she again turned a deaf ear.
Back in the Sudan, families never ate more than two meals a day, and frequently only one.
But even there Alek was told she was too skinny.
"I'd nearly starved, literally, over the years, yet they were telling me I was too fat?
"This definitely is the model's curse and it's only worsened. I've known models starve
themselves for weeks to prepare for the catwalk.
"It's always clear when someone is hungry for a long time because they tend to become
depressed and listless.
"I've felt that, not because I needed to fit into a dress but because I was a refugee. I don't
ever want to feel like that again."
She "almost dropped out of modelling", at the very start and again, "in the middle of it all,
about five years in".
She bought her house, which she and her boyfriend of four years, Riccardo Sala, an Italian
who works in real estate, have just finished renovating.
She took up painting again as a hobby. And she started her handbag company, Wek 1933
(her father's birth year), "because I like the fact that in business you have to work with a
team and you need your brain".
Recently, she has campaigned for aid agencies such as Unicef and founded a
not-for-profit organisation educating underprivileged children. Modelling gave her the
profile to do this.
"So I've been lucky. I've made good friends, because there are some designers, stylists
and editors who realise fashion isn't that important.
"Now I model in moderation, which is much better.
"To be a supermodel alongside all these young girls? No way! I tell my nephews and
nieces that modelling is not so glamorous.
"I say to the girls, 'Nothing should change your soul'.
"And they get it. They're happy finishing their schooling. I say, 'How successful you are is
how at ease you feel in your own shoes'."
Ah, shoes. The shoes Alek came in are old moccasins, pulled on with a pink shirt and
jeans. The shoes for the shoot are vertiginous spikes.
"My boyfriend says he loves to see me like this," she says, tottering in sequins and full
slap.
"Tuh! Like I'm going out for the groceries dressed like this!"
The photographer asks her to move and twirl but, if anything, Alek grows more stationary.
There's something vulnerable, slightly gawky about her - a throwback to models like
Twiggy. It's as if she lacks the necessary self-regard.
And note the things she hasn't fixed.
Her teeth are brilliantly white - a good advert, she chuckles, for Sudanese dental hygiene,
which consisted of daily cleaning with a stick and powdered cow dung - but they are gappy
and one projects forwards slightly.
She was never going to be an identikit beauty, of course, but it takes some strength not to
conform to the general details.
And the future, after modelling?
"If it was up to my boyfriend, we would have a kid today," she says.
Or up to her mother, who fears Alek will leave it too late and have to satisfy her maternal
urges by adopting.
"Having or getting a child is not the hardest part; raising the child is the hard part," she
says, repeating one of her mother's aphorisms.
"If I could get just a bit of my mother's wisdom - even in exile, she's at peace," Alek sighs.
She suffers odd moments of disassociation.
Once, at JFK airport, she was watching TV footage of Sierra Leone, "a long line of
dark-skinned people fleeing their homes".
Observing her fellow passengers, chatting on phones, tapping on laptops, she was
stricken by loneliness.
"I felt closer to the refugees than I did to the privileged travellers whose class I had
somehow joined."
Born: 16 April
Where: Sudan
Height: 180 cm
Bust: 86 cm
Waist: 59 cm
Hips: 88 cm
CLICK HERE TO SEE HER PORTFOLIO
CLICK HERE FOR MORE SUPERMODEL
THINSPIRATION
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