The first model to wear a hijab on the cover of Vogue, the first to wear a burkini in Sports Illustrated… Halima Aden is used to breaking barriers. Here she talks about shattering stereotypes and using fashion as a force for change
Halima Aden, then aged 19, became the first contestant in the Miss USA 2016 beauty pageant to wear a hijab and burkini, attracting the attention of French fashion legend Carine Roitfeld. The following year she became the first hijab-wearing model to sign with a global modelling agency, IMG, and then the first to walk at New York fashion week, for Yeezy, the Kanye West brand. She later became the first hijab-wearing model to make the cover of Vogue – twice (first Vogue Arabia, then British Vogue) – and soon afterwards a Sports Illustrated swimsuit shoot followed. By that point she’d already become a Unicef ambassador, and a go-to voice on diversity in the fashion industry. In 2017 she gave the first TED talk at a refugee camp in Kakuma, Kenya. Teen Vogue went with her.
When we meet, at a hotel near King’s Cross, I ask if it ever gets tiring, being the first in so many different ways, shouldering the burden of representation. “Somebody needs to,” Aden says. “I want my sister, my little nieces, even my nephews to see representations of somebody who wears a hijab in modern ways, in such a way that they can relate to.” We’re sitting side by side on a window seat, Aden holding court before a little audience of PRs, management and her best friend, Lizeth, who has travelled with her from the US. Though she looks very much the high-fashion figure, all in black – sequins and brocade lace, knee-high stiletto boots – she seems younger than her 22 years, gabbing away in the stream-of-conscious slang and asides of a teenager still starstruck by the turns her life has taken.
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