Adut Akech, the South Sudanese Refugee Who Became a Global Supermodel

Adut Akech was born in South Sudan and spent part of her early childhood in Kenya, where her family lived as refugees, before resettling in Australia at around age six alongside her mother and five siblings. That early life, marked by displacement rather than the modeling-industry pedigree common among the profession’s biggest names, gives her rise in international fashion an origin story unlike most of her peers.

In Australia, teachers and classmates who struggled with her birth name took to calling her “Mary” instead, a substitution Akech has spoken about publicly in interviews as she built her modeling career under her actual name. Her professional breakthrough came in 2016, when the French fashion house Saint Laurent cast her exclusively for its Spring/Summer 2017 runway show, a distinction in an industry where “exclusive” casting, meaning a designer books a model only for their own show that season, signals a level of confidence unusual for someone at the start of a career.

From that starting point, Akech’s profile expanded rapidly. She has walked runway shows for Valentino, Dior, Givenchy and Versace, and fronted advertising campaigns for houses including Balenciaga, Fendi, Moschino, Saint Laurent and Versace, appearing across the covers and editorial pages of Vogue’s American and Italian editions along with i-D and other major fashion publications. By 2018, outlets covering the industry were describing her as the world’s top-ranked model by the modeling industry’s own tracking services, a recognition formalized in 2019 when she was named Model of the Year at the British Fashion Council’s Fashion Awards.

Akech has used her platform to speak directly about her background as a refugee and about the fashion industry’s uneven record on including Black models and models with recent African or diaspora backgrounds in top campaigns and shows, framing her own visibility as tied to a broader, still incomplete push toward greater representation in an industry long criticized for narrow casting norms. Her career has continued to expand into brand ambassadorships and modeling campaigns well beyond the runway work that first established her, keeping her among the most recognizable names to emerge from the wave of African-born models who gained prominence in international fashion during the late 2010s.