Winnie Harlow would rather be thought of as an inspiration than a role model.
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Appearing on her first cover with Elle Canada for the magazine’s February issue, set to hit newsstands on Jan. 5, the 22-year-old Toronto-born model speaks with editor-in-chief Vanessa Craft about feeling confident in her own skin, her emerging career in fashion and the pressures of being hailed as a role model.
Harlow, who was discovered on Instagram by Tyra Banks, opens up to the magazine about growing up with vitiligo. “As I grew up, people would still stare, but, I don’t know, me feeling uncomfortable just disappeared,” she says. “I’d be walking out with friends and they’d be like, ‘Don’t you feel everyone staring?’ and I’d be like, ‘No, I actually don’t. I just don’t care.'”
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After appearing as a contestant on the 21st cycle of “America’s Next Top Model”, Harlow’s modelling career hasn’t halted, becoming a seasoned favourite for many emerging Canadian fashion designers. “My sense of fashion has developed a lot,” she tells the magazine. “[But] I still have my ‘hood style – I still like to wear my gold chains and my grills.”
When it comes to being seen as a “role model”, Harlow says, “I feel like I am an inspiration. That’s the word I prefer. I don’t believe that I have to be a role model, someone to be emulated. My mom inspires me, and I take great things from her, but there are things from my mom that I would never do. So I don’t have my mother as a role model, but I do have her as a huge inspiration.”
