Signed by the model agency that discovered Kate Moss, Londoner Shahira Yusuf is the outspoken and politically engaged Muslim model who is fast becoming the new face of ‘modest fashion’
When Shahira Yusuf signed with Storm Models, the first thing she did was sit down with her agent and write a list. These were her “boundaries”, the rules that stylists and photographers should be made aware of before a shoot. She must have her arms covered, she must have her chest covered, and her hair. She must not be expected to wear clothes that are very tight, nor anything that makes her feel uncomfortable. “I’m fully prepared for some people not to like me, but it’s just as possible that would be because I’m a woman as because I wear the hijab,” she says. “But I’m firm, and headstrong, and I’m not going to succumb to negative voices.”
The office of an international model agency is an interesting place in which to consider beauty. In reception a middle-aged man makes notes on the products he needs to buy to perfect his teenage daughter’s hair – she wobbles down the corridor in heels re-learning how to walk. The walls are covered with head shots: these are the faces that sell things, and these are the faces that define, for a season anyway, what beauty is. When only white girls, when only white girls with blonde hair and flat chests and shiny skin lead fashion campaigns and appear on the covers of magazines, then the implication is that other types of women are not beautiful. The impact of that ripples through women’s lives, influencing their self-worth, their identities, the limits of what is possible. Which is why this stuff matters. It matters that 21-year-old Yusuf, the youngest of eight siblings brought up in Stratford, east London, was signed by the agency that discovered Kate Moss. It matters that she is being promoted as the new face of “modest fashion”. Although, she says, matter-of-factly, “I have always felt beautiful.”
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