Winnie Harlow Says There's Still "A Lot of Work to Do" In Making the Modeling Industry More Inclusive

Fashion Week is here again, bringing plenty of next-level runway beauty moments. One topic that continues to arise when it comes to backstage coverage is diversity, whether we’re talking about the casting process or the makeup artists and hairstylists involved. It’s a conversation that model Winnie Harlow is speaking at length to in a new op-ed.

"When it comes to inclusiveness, [the modeling industry] still has a lot of work to do," Winnie wrote in a powerful essay she penned for the June issue of Glamour. "Today I represent a different standard of what people traditionally consider beauty."

In the essay, the 23-year-old model opened up about the fact that even with countless editorial shoots and fashion shows under her belt, she still continues to come across hair and makeup artists who don't know how to work with her complexion or hair type: "For example, with hairdressers — just because you’ve worked on one black person’s hair doesn’t mean you know all black hair," Winnie wrote. "If you’ve worked on Naomi Campbell, that’s not the same as working on kinky hair. There are so many people who are like, 'Yeah! I’ve worked on a black girl before. I know black hair.' And then they still reach for the tongs or use too high a heat."

In Winnie's personal experience, the same principle holds true for makeup; even with brands like Fenty Beauty and Dior offering an expanded shade range (and brands like Colourpop and Tarte taking steps to correct previous times they've missed the mark), she's still found that makeup artists don't always have products that fit her skin tone. "With makeup artists, we need to have more people who know how to work with someone with a dark skin tone and not have it turn gray or ashy," Winnie wrote. "Even this past fashion week, I was backstage and put in front of a makeup artist and I looked at the range of tones she had—she didn’t even have colors dark enough for my skin. If you don’t even have shades dark enough for me, that’s saying a lot."

Winnie, who has Vitiligo, also took the opportunity to reiterate the fact that the condition is not something she "suffers" from, a label she recently addressed in a March 26 Instagram post after The Evening Standard referred to her as a "Vitiligo sufferer." "Just because you see someone with whatever it is, even a pimple, you don’t get to say that they are suffering," she wrote in Glamour. "It’s very rude for anyone to describe me as a sufferer, and it takes away from everything else — I’m 100 percent excelling in everything I do."

However, that's not to say that racism isn't still prevalent in fashion: Last season, model Londone Myers posted an Instagram time-lapse video of her sitting in a chair backstage, while models behind her move about, getting their hair done as Londone is completely ignored by the hairstylists. Definitely not OK.

Although there's still plenty of progress to be made, Winnie acknowledges that the industry has visibly shifted from the early days of her modeling career. Citing fellow model Adwoa Aboah's British Vogue cover as an example, she writes that "It’s so beautiful that there are so many different people and so many different sizes and all that [represented]. Growing up, I would never have imagined someone with vitiligo or freckles on the cover of a magazine."

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Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: Winnie Harlow Says America’s Next Top Model “Didn't Do Anything” for Her Career