Jourdan Dunn: ‘The supermodel’s beauty is classic in its rendering, and refreshing in its uniqueness.’ Photograph: Mary McCartney for the Guardian
Jourdan Dunn is beautiful. That is a purely objective, immutable statement, similar to saying the sun is a source of heat, or that sugar makes humans happy. The supermodel’s beauty is classic in its rendering, and refreshing in its uniqueness. It is British, which makes it witty and knowing, and it is black, which makes it quite lonely in an industry as exclusionary as fashion.
Exquisite outer shell aside, Dunn seems a lovely, funny sort. She was scouted when she was 15 (“Everybody says I was spotted shopping in Primark,” she later said, clarifying with, one imagines, a genteel sniff: “I wasn’t shopping. I was with my friend”), and only a few years later, became the first black British model to enter Forbes’ rich list. There’s modelling, and then there’s modelling.
She hasn’t held her tongue about her industry’s diversity problems, either (a major clue is in the fashion term “nude”: a lot of us aren’t even close to that in our birthday suits). In 2007 she asked: “London’s not a white city, so why should our catwalks be so white?” More recently, she revealed the casual racism of a makeup artist who refused to work on her because of her skin colour.
Alongside these unhappy bumps have been accolades and barrier-breaking campaigns, from Burberry to Victoria’s Secret. She even found time to present a YouTube cooking show. Its title? Well Dunn With Jourdan Dunn. How could you not like her?
Dunn just got British Vogue’s February 2015 cover, an honour not bestowed on a solo black model since Naomi Campbell in 2002. It’s not right, but it’s OK. And there’ll be more – Dunn’s the real deal.
