Joan Smalls is the shining star on the cover of the January 2014 issue of American Elle Magazine.
“I came to New York with a dream,” says Smalls, who was born in Puerto Rico, as she shrugs off a Rag & Bone jacket borrowed from her boyfriend of four years, entrepreneur Bernard Smith. “I came to do what I saw girls doing in campaigns, in editorials—great things, challenging things.
“I made a list of agencies and went to all the open calls. One of the agents looked me over and said, ‘Joan, I’d love to represent you, I think you’re great, but you have to straighten your teeth.’ ” She was perplexed. “Why do I have to straighten my teeth?” she asked. “I see models with crooked teeth all the time.” The agent looked at her squarely: “Joan, those models are Caucasian, and you’re not. You’re a Black model. And it’s already a challenge.”
“I wasn’t bothered by it,” she says. “I appreciate honesty. I don’t like people beating around the bush. I thought, You know what? I’m going to take that as constructive criticism. I’m going to take my ass back to Puerto Rico, straighten my teeth, and come back.” She did exactly that, enrolling in college while her teeth were in braces and graduating magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in psychology.
Growing up, she didn’t think modeling was a feasible goal for her because of she didn’t fit the standard of beauty that she saw in PR beauty pageants “[Modeling] was never a real idea, because the aesthetic of beauty was so different from my body type. They love a curvier woman, light skinned, of average height.” It was only after catching E! True Hollywood Story episodes about Naomi Campbell and Heidi Klum, women built more like her, that the idea began to make sense.
She moved to New York [at age 19], slept on an air mattress at her aunt’s house in Queens, and picked up a trail mix of jobs—Nordstrom catalogs, a Target commercial, a Ricky Martin video, print ads for Liz Claiborne. Not bad work, but scaling fashion’s upper echelons took more time and perseverance, including a trip to Paris on her own dime in an attempt to line up an agent there. The breakthrough came in summer 2009, when Italian fashion designer Riccardo Tisci—who has since been home to Puerto Rico with her and met her parents—took one look at her and put her on exclusivity for Givenchy’s couture presentation. This was roughly the equivalent of transferring from community college to Harvard: One minute Smalls was shilling microfiber push-up bras, the next she was wearing Chantilly lace next to models Natasha Poly and Mariacarla Boscono.
“Fashion should be about creativity and visionaries, and last time I checked, the world is a multicultural place. Why shouldn’t a little girl from Puerto Rico see the runway and think, I can wear that?” She pauses, gathers her thoughts: “People hide behind the word aesthetic. They say, ‘Well, it’s just that designer’s aesthetic.’ But when you see 18 seasons in a row and not one single model outside a certain skin color?” She raises an eyebrow. “There are people in the industry who are advocates, who support diversity. And there are people who do not. I don’t get it. Beauty is universal. These doors have to open.”
Source: frillr.com
