With buzzcut, bleached brows, tooth jewellery and a face full of freckles, 25-year-old British model Adwoa Aboah is the new face for a new pace of fashion, where inclusive is the new exclusive, self-expression dominates and magnetism attracts followers – on multiple platforms. Enigmatic is out, plain-speaking and authenticity are in and no one does it better than the tattooed, pierced west Londoner, who this year fronted advertising campaigns for Gap, Versus Versace and Calvin Klein.
She is also the cover star of the current December issue of British Vogue, the first from new editor-in-chief, Edward Enninful. Aboah – who is of British and Ghanaian descent – is part of Enninful’s new guard at the title, in a contributing editor role, alongside Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss.
Her fame is international. In March, she made the cover of American Vogue in a lineup of seven models – including Gigi Hadid and Kendall Jenner – chosen to represent a “multiplicity” of skin tones and body shapes.
Like Moss, she’s noticeably shorter than most models, but her shaved head and take-it-or-leave-it attitude are what really make her stand out. At shows, her ears retain their own garnish of studs and in shoots her tattoos are on display. Her off-duty look of no makeup, tracksuit and trainers has lured in more than 350k followers to her Instagram feed.
Aboah started boarding school aged 13, where experimentation with drugs turned into a ketamine addiction, resulting in a period in rehab when she was 21. Following a relapse, she attempted suicide in October 2015 and her parents subsequently put her into psychiatric care for a month. “I did everything that everyone told me to do: I went to meetings and I talked and talked and talked and that’s all I ever did; now I’m here and I’m happy and my life’s changed. So if that’s all I had to do, then I couldn’t believe that it was that simple, to talk.”
She is now the force behind what she calls her “first love”, Gurls Talk – an online platform she co-founded with her best friend where young women can openly discuss mental health, body image and sexuality, without stigma and taboo.
“I did not know how to share with someone the fact that I felt really, really depressed,” Aboah says in Adwoa + Camilla, a short film she made with her mother – fashion agent Camilla Lowther – as part of a campaign for mental health charity Heads Together. Her treatment, as she told an audience at a Gurls Talk event hosted by Google last month, taught her “to be raw and to share my problems, my happiness, my pain, with other people in order to relate and then feel less alone”. This was the basis of Gurls Talk. Not a pretty backstory, but a beautiful, honest one. And sharing it has transformed Aboah from fashion model to role model.
• In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international suicide helplines can be found at befrienders.org.
