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| david jones SS1011 backstage |
Frockwriter was preoccupied with a fulltime gig during the Fall/Winter 2010/2011 season, so we missed quite a bit of news. Including two new rising Australian modelling stars, Adelaide’s Emily Wake and Melbourne’s Ajak Deng. We did include one mention of Deng in our preliminary SS10 Australian model wrap just after New York Fashion Week, her first international show season, in which she did just a handful of New York shows (and we originally got her surname wrong*). However it was during the Fall/Winter 2010/2011 shows in February and March when Deng really grabbed the industry’s attention, walking in over 20 shows. These included blue chip names such as Lanvin, Givenchy, Jean Paul Gaultier and Chloe – the first black girl to walk the latter’s runway in nine seasons in fact, prompting New York Magazine to ask in June, “Could Ajak Deng be the next Alek Wek?”. Like Wek, Deng is a Sudanese refugee. But while Wek’s family fled the war-torn African nation for the UK, Deng’s family settled in Melbourne in 2004 – among an estimated 23,000 Sudanese refugees who arrived in Australia from 2002-2007. Sixty-two percent are aged 24 and younger and 45percent of the settlers are believed to be female. Like Wek’s story – which Wek recounted in her autobiography in 2007 – Deng’s story is remarkable. The second of eight children, Deng lost her mother to malaria at the age of 12 while living in a Kenyan refugee camp and took charge of her infant sister. Three years ago her father moved back to Sudan and her stepmother left to join him. Since she was 16, Deng has been financially responsible for her seven siblings.
