South Sudan – the African country producing fashion’s favourite models

Bearing a discreet but chic outfit, flowing braids and a free face and pinkish makeup, Akol arop looks like your typical rest model.

She sinks into the sofa in the offices of her British agency, First Model Management, and details the booming career that saw her walking tracks for luxury brands in London and Paris.

“I was watching online modeling since I was a child at the age of 11,” Akol, now at the start of the twenties, told the BBC.

Over the past three years, it has been broadcast worldwide during modeling, even sharing a track with Naomi Campbell during a broken white show.

Traveling for work can become alone, but Akol constantly comes up against the models of his country of birth – the luxuriant but disturbed of Sudan.

“The Sudanese South people have become very well known for their beauty,” explains Akol, who has high cheekbones, rich and dark skin and measures 5 feet 10 inches high.

Browse a fashion magazine or digitization images of a parade and you will see the point of Akol – models born and raised in South Sudan, or those of the country’s important diaspora, are everywhere.

They go from arrivals, like Akol, to models like Anok Yai, Adut Akech and Alek Wek.

After being spotted in a London parking lot in 1995, Wek was one of the very first South Sudanese models to find worldwide success. Since then, she has appeared on many vogue covers and modeled for Dior and Louis Vuitton.

And the popularity of the South Sudanese models does not show any sign of decrease-the main models of industry platform compile an annual list of the 50 best stars “of modeling and in its latest selection, one model in five has a south-Sudanese heritage.

Elsewhere, Vogue presented four South Sudanese models In his article on the “11 young models placed to storm the catwalks in 2025”.

“The expectation of what a model should be-most of the South Sudanese models have it,” said Dawson Deng, who heads the South Sudan fashion week in the country’s capital, Juba, with his former model Trisha Nyachak.

“They have perfect and dark skin. They have melanin. They have the height.”

Lucia Janosova, a first -hand management casting agent, tells the BBC: “Of course, they are beautiful … Beautiful skin, the height.”

However, she says that she does not know exactly why fashion brands are looking for South Sudanese models on other nationalities.

“I am unable to tell you because there are many girls who are so beautiful and that they are Mozambique, Nigeria, or different countries, right?” Ms. Janosova adds.

Akur Goi, a South Sudanese model that worked with designers like Givenchy and Armani, has a theory.

She thinks that the South Sudanese models are in demand not only for their physical beauty, but also for their “resilience”.

Goi was born in Juba but as a child, she moved to neighboring Uganda, like Akol and hundreds of thousands of other Sudanese in the South.

Many fled in the years after 2011, when South Sudan became independent of Sudan.

There were great hopes for the new world nation, but only two years later, a civil war broke out, during which 400,000 people were killed and 2.5 million fled their homes for places like Uganda.

Although the civil war ended after five years, other waves of violence, natural disasters and poverty mean that people continue to leave.

Recently, the fighting between the government and the opposition forces have increased – Sparking Fear that the country will come back to the civil war.

After leaving a South Sudan launched for Uganda, Goi’s “biggest dream” was to become a model.

Fantasy became reality last year, when she was spotted by agents via Facebook. For her very first work, she walked for the Italian fashion giant Roberto Cavalli.

“I was super excited and ready for my first season … I was really nervous and frightened but I said to myself:” I can do it “- because it was a dream,” said Goi, speaking to the Milan BBC, after stolen for a job at the last minute.

But some South Sudanese models have experienced more tumultuous trips.

An investigation by the British newspaper time found that two refugees living in a camp in Kenya were transported to Europe to be informed that they were too bad to appear on the track.

After completing the modeling jobs, several others were informed that they owed their agencies thousands of euros – because certain contracts specify that visas and flights must be reimbursed, generally once the models start to earn money.

Akol says she has encountered a similar problem. When she was spotted in 2019, the agency in question asked her to pay numerous costs – costs that she now knows the agencies do not normally ask.

“I was asked for money for registration, money for that, for that. I couldn’t manage all that. I am struggling, my family is hard, so I can’t manage all of this,” she said.

Three years later, when he lived in Uganda, she was finally spotted by a more famous agency.

Deng, which helps the Sudanese southern Sudanese models to produce portfolios, told the BBC that some have complained to be paid for clothing jobs, rather than money.

Many models also present themselves to another challenge – the perception of their family of their career choice.

“They didn’t want it and they don’t want it now,” said Akol, who now lives in London about his own loved ones.

“But we [models] managed to come and say: “We are [a] young country. We have to go there and meet people. We have to do things everyone does. ‘”

Deng says that those who live in urban areas have become more open -minded, but some Sudanese in the South compare modeling to prostitution.

Parents question the whole concept – wondering why their daughters “would walk in front of people,” he said.

Deng remembers a young woman he helped who was about to fly to his first international job. Misheritic that she models, the woman’s family followed her at the airport and prevented her from getting on the plane.

But, says Deng, the relatives of the woman finally came and she has since modeled for a lingerie brand.

“This girl is in fact the family’s support for the family. She takes all her brothers and sisters to school and nobody talks about it more like a bad thing,” he said.

It is “proud” to see this model – and others from South Sudan – on the world scene and although the industry passes through trends, Deng does not believe that the South Sudanese models will shirk.

Goi agrees, saying that there is a “growing demand for fashionable diversity”.

Akol also thinks that South Sudan is there to stay there, declaring: “Alek Wek did it before my birth and she still does it now.

“The South Sudanese models will go very far.”