Model Kukua Williams Pens a Moving Letter to the Fashion Industry

Black-British model Kukua Williams, 24, who has worked with the likes of Celine, Erdem, and Jil Sander, posted a photo of herself taken while she was detained in an Italian airport during Milan Fashion Week. It went viral on March 7, and in the caption, she described how the experience had left her deeply shaken: “I’m sharing to shed light on the issues Black models have to face in this industry, issues that would not happen and haven’t happened to everyone,” she wrote. The comments were a testimony to the fact that this wasn’t an isolated incident.

Here, Williams writes a first-hand account of that day and highlights the changes that need to be made in the fashion industry, and beyond, to stamp out racism once and for all.

I first experienced racism in the fashion industry not long after I started modeling. I was on a job with one other non-Black model. While the team referred to her by her name, I was ‘the Black girl’. At that moment, I began to question my worth: was my only job to fulfill a diversity quota?

Every Black model has their breaking point, whether it’s your hair being handled incorrectly one too many times, police stopping you on your way to a casting or your name repeatedly being mispronounced. My breaking point came during Milan Fashion Week AW21 when I was detained in an Italian airport for 24 hours for no apparent reason. While this may sound shocking to some, situations like this can be a normality for Black models.

I was prepared for thorough checks of my documentation as well as being questioned in regards to my reasons for traveling during a pandemic (castings for potential work). What I was not prepared for was being denied entry to a country seemingly because of the color of my skin. My documents were in order, and non-Black models from my agency had done the same journey in the days before without any problem.

Throughout my 24-hour detention, I was told no one was allowed to enter Italy from the UK unless they were an Italian citizen. The authorities refused to read the letter I was carrying from my agency, which was the same as all the other models had, and told me castings weren’t a good enough reason for entry. They restricted me from using my phone and I had my passport confiscated. The following day, I was driven to a plane that would take me back to England in a police car, as though I were a criminal. The experience left me traumatized.