Shanelle Nyasiase, Angok Mayen, and George Okeny are Sundanese models who have been heating up runways New York to Milan to Paris and magazines lately, and Vogue is highlighting their successes and challenges in a new mini-documentary.
In a powerful six-minute video, the group of stars are highlighted with imagery-driven visuals, speaking about their paths from Sudan to the issues they’ve faced in the fashion industry, and while traveling and living in the world abroad.
Telling their stories
Nyasiase, 21, was born in Ethiopia and grew up in the Sudan. With the most acclaim out of the pack, she’s walked in more than 40 high-fashion shows, and has been seen in ads from H&M to Alexander McQueen.
Nyasiase referred to Naomi Campbell as her influence as a child, and says she grew up in Africa with girls who wanted to be just like the superstar.
‘Imagine you are in that group and all of the sudden you jump to the people that you want to be like,’ said Nyasiase, referring to her sudden catapult from a fan to a colleague.
Currently living in Kenya, but jumping around from the world for work — primarily within the states and Europe — Nyasiase admits that she still doesn’t feel that she truly “belongs.”
The also described the work as daunting, due to the hardships she’s faced in getting visas and work permits. Speaking on the discrimination, she added that she wished most people would see it isn’t her or other people from different countries, but the government causing the turmoil.
Okeny, a male model whose also a Philipp Plein regular, was born Sudanese and lived there until he was seven. One day, his mother came back from a trip and abruptly moved his family to Egypt before they were accepted into the United States as refugees.
Okeny got his jump-start via Instagram, where he says agencies reached out to him.
The struggles in the business
But his issues with working permits are just as Nyasiase. Last January, he was scheduled to model in a Gucci campaign but his green card had expired, which made him ineligible to participate. At the time, there was also Trump’s infamous “ban on certain countries” that halted his progress.
“There’s a stigma that when they see Arabic, it’s automatically considered as terrorist. My birth certificate is in Arabic, all of my documents are in Arabic so it just kept getting denied – I actually wanted to quit modeling,” said Okeny.
Now, he’s grateful he stuck with it, despite its hardships.
“People will randomly hit me on Instagram and be like ‘Hey Georgie, you’re this kid from Sudan and I’m like you,’” he recalled. “‘I’m from Kenya, I’m from Uganda and you’re such a huge inspiration’ and I want to be that voice for those kids.”
Mayan, the third of the group, is also a mother of one and has graced the pages of Vogue while holding her newborn.
Mayan ran away from Kenya when she was 14 because her father tried to marry her off. She says that her family isn’t aware of her work, as they believe “that I have a man and I just live in a house.”
Both Mayan and Okeny were displaced refugees by the Sudan civil warns, which Mayan refers to as the cause of much of her old nightmares.
“I was scared and I [would] just think about that and I [would] hope one day I would go to place where people don’t run away – there’s no war in America,” she said.