Meet Dipti Sharma, the India-Born Model Making Waves

Outside, the summer sun in Hell’s Kitchen is hanging on the scaffolds with a brightly yellowed haze. Inside, in the basement of a West Forty-ninth Street gym called TMPL, the climate is starkly different: The air is cold, and overhead, UV mood lamps cast a purple glow. Glancing up, the 23-year-old Rudrapur, India–born model Dipti Sharma smiles and says, “You know, my name means ‘light’ in Hindi.”

Sharma, who lives nearby on the East Side, arrived in Manhattan just over a year ago, and she loves it. “Even if I am in a bad mood, I’ll go out and be fine,” she says. “I think it’s the adrenaline.” Since surfacing on the worldwide modeling circuit when she walked (exclusively) for Balenciaga’s spring 2018 show, she has starred in an ad campaign and appeared on runways for designers including Michael Kors, Dolce & Gabbana, Alexander Wang, and Dries Van Noten. Still, it’s a long arc from growing up in northeastern India to becoming one of the most buzzed-about models of the moment. Given India’s virtual absence from the field of internationally represented models (along with that of many southern and southeastern Asian countries)—it’s a milestone feat that took both guts and nonstop gumption.

“I got the idea of glamour from my mother, who wanted to be Miss India—or an air hostess,” says Sharma. “I was told by someone early that I wasn’t beauty-pageant material, but that maybe modeling could work.” She’d watch FashionTV as an adolescent and soon veered away from the career route that her father, in particular, had planned: “a regular job, maybe the Air Force or something managerial. My dad was not supportive of modeling—he wanted me to study.”

As a teenager, Sharma spent time shuttling to New Delhi, about five hours southwest of Rudrapur, and Mumbai, telling her parents to give her three months to get signed. She eventually won a modeling contest in 2015, when she was 20, but was still not sure she’d be brought on to an agency. In fact, when Balenciaga sent a scout to India in 2017, Sharma was dismissed. The pressure was starting to weigh heavily on her. “There was a point when I was doing jobs here and there when people were just”—she pauses—“cruel. They’d tell my sister, ‘Dipti is cheap.’ ” She pauses again, looking away. “That was hard for me to hear. I struggled with that.”

Sharma says much of this was due to India’s societal pressure for girls to go to school, come home, and get married. (She adds that, since becoming known, she has received dozens of messages from aspiring Indian creatives, telling her that they’d found the courage to stand up to their parents after seeing her success.)

Her momentum began to accelerate when she went to Paris last September and re-met with Balenciaga, this time with Lotta Volkova, the label’s stylist. Sharma nabbed the spring exclusive, along with a new haircut, a kind of neatly elongated bob. This was in and of itself a bold departure from the cultural norm, given her mother’s Sikhism, which prohibits hair-cutting—though Sharma herself is not religious.

Sharma seems relieved at her success, her trademark toughness softened by knowing she’s in her ascent. She’s also in extraordinarily good shape: She boxes; she runs; she plays pickup basketball. And the family pressure? Sharma laughs. “They are now proud! If I don’t call my dad for a day, he will call, like, 20 times. He’s like the kid now.”

But even with her big breakthrough within reach, lingering cultural roadblocks remained. “On that Paris trip, before I booked Balenciaga, I’d been told by some friends in the industry, ‘You’re Indian and you’re brown—people might not take you as seriously in Paris in the beginning.’ ”

Now, with fashion deeply immersed in trampling barriers, beauty is becoming less stratified. It’s progress that, Sharma says, extends to India. “In the past year or two, the big agencies have sent a lot of scouts over,” she says. Michael Kors, who cast Dipti for his fall 2018 runway, adds, “I think Dipti adds a real personality to everything she wears—she has a modern elegance, strength, and a real presence. And I was knocked out by her fabulous hair!”