'The standards of beauty have changed, Alek is the expression of modernity in beauty'
'I don't walk around with a chip on my shoulder," says supermodel Alek Wek, who, despite the many obstacles in her path - she fled strife-torn Sudan as a child and lived as a refugee in London - has conquered the fashion industry.
The Sunday Times caught up with the 33-year-old catwalk queen while she was filming an advertising campaign for Woolworths in Cape Town.
Wek was in high spirits, despite a gruelling day in front of the cameras. "Yeah, isn't it cute?" she said, pointing to a T-shirt with a South African flag clinging on her lean frame.
Surrounded by wardrobe assistants, make-up artists, drivers and plates piled with food, Wek posed for top international photographers in bright clothes and accessories.
She has been credited with shifting conventional perceptions of beauty since her big break in 1995, when she appeared in a leopard-print bikini in Tina Turner's single Goldeneye, the theme song for the James Bond movie of the same name.
But her life of luxury today stands in stark contrast to her past. As a nine-year-old the slim beauty from the Dinka tribe in Southern Sudan fled the civil war with a floral print dress and flip-flops, ate leaf stew and slept under the stars.
She made it to London, where she scrubbed toilets and worked in a hair salon before being discovered by a modelling scout in 1995.
"I felt like a fish out of water when I first started in the business. I was freaking, you know. But I had very good support from my team. My mother was there for me and I started practising the things she had always taught me," she said.
As a child, she cleaned her teeth in the traditional method, using ash from burnt cow manure and a stick softened by chewing. She first visited a dentist when she was 26, who announced that her molars were in tip top shape.
"He said that I had incredibly healthy teeth, so I'm definitely an advocate of sticks and dung powder for oral health! Although I admit that when I left Africa (settling in London and New York) I started using a toothbrush and toothpaste, since I no longer had cows," she writes in her autobiography, Alek: from Sudanese Refugee to International Supermodel.
Princeton University in the US recently announced a new course on beauty and ethnicity that will feature the book as prescribed study material.
Wek shares intimate memories and thoughts in the book, published two years ago: "A couple of years ago I was in the first-class lounge at JFK waiting for a flight to Paris when CNN started showing footage of people fleeing their homes in Sierra Leone.
"It was a long line of dark-skinned people, mothers holding children's hands, fathers carrying bundles, the lucky ones wearing sandals and the rest barefoot on the dusty road ... In many ways I felt closer to these refugees in their ragged clothes than I did to the privileged international travellers whose class I had somehow joined."
Wek recalls her frustration in the early stages of her career at being stereotyped as "exotic" and overlooked by the mainstream. "Curiously, the other girls kept getting covers. A year passed. Almost every cover of Elle featured a very light-skinned girl."
The turning point came in 1998, when a picture of her by Gilles Bensimon - a former husband of Elle McPherson - appeared on the cover of Elle. It shows her at a slight angle, in a white Armani jacket open to her navel.
"Gilles made no attempt to hide my natural features - my full lips, my skin, my tightly curled hair ... The issue sold like crazy and it seemed that every newspaper and magazine in America wrote about how the cover challenged our traditional conceptions of beauty."
Wek appeared on Oprah Winfrey's show and soon she was showcasing Karl Lagerfeld and John Galliano creations on catwalks around the world.
"Suddenly I symbolised a kind of freedom from fashion tyranny for a lot of people," she wrote.
At the time, Lagerfeld told a journalist: "The standards of beauty have changed, Alek is the expression of modernity in beauty."
Wek revisited Sudan four years ago, after a peace deal was signed in 2005.
"Going back, I was so inspired, and I needed to put my memoirs into writing," she said. "It's not just about me, it's bigger than that, it's the history, having gone through the civil war at a very tender age, and my parents having lived through two civil wars. It was painful."
Four years after chronicling her thoughts, Wek says she does not harbour grudges: "First of all I am a model, a Dinka model. And I'm very proud of that. I am comfortable with who I am.
"When I came into the industry people did say, 'Oh, she's different.' But the thing was, I never thought so. Nobody judges you but yourself. And if the business was all racist I wouldn't be where I am. However, there is always room for improvement. Once we don't close doors on girls who happen to be Japanese, Chinese or Dinka or South African, whether with Asian, Caucasian or Zulu features, that would be great."
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