Alek Wek's Path From Sudanese Refugee to International Supermodel

Alek Wek was born in 1977 in Wau, in what is now South Sudan, into a country whose civil war would upend her childhood and, eventually, redirect her life entirely. In 1991, at age 14, she fled to Britain to escape that war, arriving as a refugee with no connection to the fashion world that would come to define her career.

That connection arrived unplanned in 1995, when Wek was discovered and quickly drawn into modeling; she appeared that same year in Tina Turner’s music video for “GoldenEye,” an early, high-visibility credit for a model with no formal industry background. She signed with the agency Ford Models in 1996, and her career accelerated fast enough that by 1997 MTV named her its Model of the Year, the same year she became the first African model to appear on the cover of Elle magazine, a specific, dateable milestone in an industry where cover placement functioned as one of the clearest public markers of a model’s standing.

Wek went on to appear in music videos for artists including Janet Jackson, work alongside campaigns for major fashion houses including Chanel, Dior and Calvin Klein over the following decades, building a modeling career whose longevity, spanning three decades by the 2020s, set her apart from models whose visibility often fades within a few years of their initial breakthrough. She expanded beyond runway and print work into her own handbag line, Wek 1933, named for the year her father was born, and into acting and humanitarian advocacy tied to her own history as a refugee.

In 2007 Wek published an autobiography, “Alek: From Sudanese Refugee to International Supermodel,” putting her own account of that journey, from a childhood shaped by war and displacement to a career among fashion’s most recognized faces, into a fuller record than the magazine profiles and red-carpet coverage that had framed her story up to that point. The BBC named her to its list of 100 Women in 2015, formal recognition of an influence that, by then, had long since outgrown the modeling industry that first made her name.