It’s a sleepy Friday morning on a sparse street in Paris’s 11th arrondissement, the air carrying the unremarkable rhythm of a city not quite awake. But behind the heavy time-worn black doors of a cavernous studio the quiet dissolves. In a brightly lit dressing room, the lull gives way to a full-bodied din.
Anok Yai is in the chair. “Sitting” feels like an understatement. She shifts, laughs, talks and moves to the music – a mishmash of Afro beats and R&B. Her energy doesn’t just fill the room, it spills beyond its edges. She’s wearing a cloud-soft white dressing gown; her face is covered in a ghoulish glossy white jelly-textured mask. And yet nothing about her is obscured. Her voice – low, stopping short of nasally – moves between playful exaggeration and sharply observed commentary. Her eyes: piercing, commanding. Her cheekbones have an otherworldly pointedness about them. And her full lips – well, it is almost indecent how perfectly sculpted they are.
Mask peeled away, it’s hard not to be mesmerised by her skin – the hue, tone, glow, how it catches the light every time she moves. (Later she tells me that she, an amateur painter herself, loves the work of Kerry James Marshall, an artist known for centring Black figures in sumptuously saturated tones, a love letter to Blackness if you will, which makes total sense.) Jawara, Anok’s hairstylist and a longtime friend, works easily around her, shaving off her TWA (teeny weeny Afro) with an assured precision as she chatters and jokes, barely pausing for breath. (“We are the only ones who can talk to each other like that,” says Jawara later, cracking up. “People ask, ‘Are you guys arguing?’ And I’m like, ‘No! We’re not arguing!’ It’s a cultural thing. I’m crazy and she’s crazy!”)
Some weeks earlier, Yai and I meet on a crisp night in New York, where she is markedly quieter. She’s chosen Bibliotheque in SoHo – a dimly lit bookstore-café-bar hybrid that feels suspended from the city’s usual velocity. “I know no one will recognise me,” she says, smiling conspiratorially. At 5ft 10in in flats, surprisingly, Yai has the art of disappearing in plain sight down to a science. She arrives in an ecru Miu Miu ear-flap beanie, a pair of fashionably geeky thick framed glasses (also Miu Miu), a fitted white T-shirt tucked into boyish jeans, a Crombie-style coat over her slight frame (yes, that’s Miu Miu too – someone give the woman a campaign). She looks convincingly bookish, though there is nothing performative about it. She’s a voracious reader, though her route to books was pretty unorthodox. “My dad used to force me to read dictionaries and encyclopedias. He’d do a test and if I passed we’d go to McDonald’s. I don’t remember ever hating reading, but I also didn’t care. I was just like, ‘I’m gonna get my McDonald’s.’” She cites Dostoevsky and Poe as two of her favourite writers. “I feel like people are going back to physical books, which makes me so happy.” She pauses. “I don’t know where this ‘stupid model’ thing came from,” she adds with an eye roll. “All the girls are backstage reading. There’s nothing else to do.”
Yai recently read Steven L Peck’s psychological thriller A Short Stay In Hell. The title now feels almost unnervingly apt. On 19 December 2025, in an Instagram post that shocked her three million followers, Yai revealed “this silent battle” she had been living with: a debilitating lung condition that ultimately required advanced robotic surgery. “Basically I had a congenital defect where I had a very large artery coming out of my heart and going to the bottom-left half of my lung. It was pumping so much blood that the tissue on my lung was dying and my heart was getting overworked to the point where I was going to go into cardiac arrest. When they told me this I was so confused, because I’ve been a generally very healthy person all my life. It almost felt like they were talking about somebody else.”
Only weeks earlier, she had been on stage at the British Fashion Awards, receiving the model of the year award from her close friends Paloma Elsesser and Alex Consani. Her custom Dilara Findikoglu gown – think Wuthering Heights meets ’90s-era Vivienne Westwood – was replaced by a surgical gown; her body tethered to machines and tubes in a Manhattan hospital, an oxygen mask strapped to her face, her mother beside her, steady and watchful. The Instagram carousel of images was alarming. Among the posts, a quieter detail: a blurred snapshot of The Count of Monte Cristo. “The devil was coming for me! So I needed inspiration!” she says with an exaggerated, loud shriek. “That was what was keeping me alive in the hospital. That, and Teresa Giudice in The Real Housewives of New Jersey.” Her humour lands like that: dry, unexpected, well timed.
Beneath the easy confidence in her voice, however, lies a fragility. Without make-up, Yai can look closer to a teen boy than a 28-year-old woman. I ask how she is. Her words come quickly: “I have days where I am still feeling quite sick. I lost a lot of my stamina [but] I have a lot of nerve damage…” Her eyes began to glaze with tears, her voice betraying the shock of being confronted so brutally by her own mortality. She takes a sip of Merlot – for courage, perhaps? – sits up straighter and says, laughing, “I have so much to say.”
Her recovery was supposed to last a fortnight. It didn’t. “My lung capacity was getting smaller and I was in intense pain. My nerves were damaged from the surgery so we thought it might be that.” But the pain persisted. Even walking, a necessary part of her healing, became excruciating. “I remember I would try to walk through the Brooklyn Museum and I couldn’t even get past two rooms. I was, like, ‘My runway career is over.’” In January, she was rushed back to hospital. “My ward became like a war room for the doctors with everyone just trying to figure out what was wrong, how to make sure I didn’t die.”
The diagnosis was severe: dead lung tissue, sepsis, necrosis, pneumonia. A surgery that was expected to take two hours stretched to five. “I remember waking up and the doctor was like: ‘Oh my God, that was close. We almost lost you. You almost died.’ The gravity of it hit me.” Her voice shakes. “I just remember the looks on my family’s faces, how silent everyone was. I remember thinking, ‘If I die right now, everyone’s going to just wake up tomorrow morning. The sun is still going to go up and life is going to continue.’ I never felt so significant and insignificant at the same time. ” She takes another sip of wine.
Yai’s mother, Nyibol Akuei – a kindly, soft-spoken nurse – still struggles to revisit her daughter’s brush with death. When we speak, her face darkens as she says, “It was so scary.” She swallows hard. “Anok and I are very, very close. She is not the kind of person who really cries and when I saw her cry because the pain was so bad…” She trails off in thought. “The time we spent at the hospital was not easy at all. But a lot of people were praying. And the doctors were wonderful.” Later, Yai sends me the full name of her consultant, Dr Robert Cerfolio. “Will you please mention him?” she asks. “We need to give him a shoutout!” she adds enthusiastically, like a DJ hyping up a track for the crowd.
The first signs that something might be wrong started to emerge back in early 2025 during a long shoot that required her to be immersed in water. That night she began projectile vomiting. “I just thought I had a stomach bug.” Still, she booked a scan “just to make sure I didn’t have any parasites”. There were none. But something else surfaced. “The lady was looking at the scan and was like, ‘Why is your heart shaped like that?’ I then spent the rest of the year researching the best doctor to help me.”
Astonishingly, she told no one aside from one close friend. “I called him crying, being like, ‘Oh my God, I think I’m gonna die.’” She still wonders whether she made the right decision, keeping it to herself for so long. “I didn’t want my parents stressed out for the whole year. They freaked out when I finally told them.” She also needed time to confront her own fears around death. “I’ve always been terrified of dying. It overwhelms me sometimes. So when I heard that my heart was in danger of stopping, I think I just focused on hiding it from everyone and going to work and making sure that I seemed like I was OK. I remember at some shows I’d be in the bathroom coughing up blood. It’s really strange looking back, knowing that was happening at the same time my whole career was happening…”
Yai’s ascent reads like a fashion fairy tale. Born in 1997 in Cairo to parents who had fled the genocide in Sudan, she came to America when she was three. They initially lived in New York (“my mom hated it”) and then moved to New Hampshire, where the family eventually settled and expanded. “I have three sisters and two brothers. I thank God I’m not the eldest,” she says, laughing. “Too much stress.” Her father, Kenyang Yai, who works with disabled children, recalls Anok as being: “unique. She was the kid that never gave me a hard time. She was very intelligent. Brilliant at school.” Anok’s memories of growing up in New Hampshire are less about academics. “It was so racist. I remember walking to school, people would throw eggs at me. They called me the N-word. I had people pour buckets of water on me from, like, the third floor. There’s certain streets that I purposely wouldn’t walk on because I knew something would happen in New Hampshire.” Her experience at school was no less challenging.
“I was considered like the ugliest girl at school. Like…” She pauses for a second. “I mean, I wouldn’t say I got bullied, because I fought back a lot. But yes, I was the butt of the jokes, I was the laughing stock. I wasn’t deemed beautiful but everyone told me I was smart – and I knew that for a fact and that was enough for me to feel confident in myself. I just basically accepted that I wasn’t attractive. Then I started modelling and it flipped completely.”
October 2017 marked the turning point. A photographer, Steve “the Sunk” Hall, took a picture of her at Homecoming Week at Howard University, the prestigious, historically Black university in Washington, DC. He posted it on Instagram and the image went viral; model agencies came calling. Yai is keen to correct a perennial myth in her story, though. “People think I attended Howard University,” she says, with a chuckle. “I just went to the Homecoming looking for cute guys.”
In a matter of months she was breaking ground as the first Sudanese model to open the Prada runway show and, at the time, only the second Black model ever to open a Prada show (the first was Naomi Campbell in 1997). Initially, her parents were not delighted – they had plans for her to become a doctor. “We used to watch America’s Next Top Model together,” recalls Nyibol, “and I used to say, ‘Who are these girls? What is this modelling? I would never let my kid go there and cry. These are beautiful girls, they don’t need to do this, they can get another job.’” Now her mother says: “We are very very happy she is doing so well. We are so proud. We knew modelling wasn’t easy.”
She was right. Nothing, not even the supposedly straightforward elements of the job, was a breeze, recalls Yai. “ In the early days, agents and fashion directors were trying to teach me how to walk. There was one particular agent who kept trying to show me. To me it looked like she was just walking down the street. Then I would do it and she’d say: ‘No.’ But then,” she says, rolling her eyes with incredulity, “they had never walked before so they really had no business teaching me. I remember them being like, ‘Walk like Naomi! Walk like Naomi!’ And I’m like, ‘You fucking walk like Naomi!’” She began studying other models’ “fashion walks” –including Naomi’s – but it took time to figure out her own. “When I look at the walks I did in the beginning of my career, I’m like, ‘Oh my God, it’s so bad,’” she says, laughing and looking mortified. Now she’s an icon on the modern runway, with a walk some have described as “the Panther Glide, because I walk so slow”.
Yet despite her success – Yai has walked for most major luxury fashion houses – the “model stigma” remained something she was uncomfortable with. “Everyone thought that I was beautiful, but they also thought that I was stupid. It got to the point where it aggravated me so much that there’d be times where people would be like: ‘Oh, you’re so beautiful’ and I would be like, ‘You don’t think I’m talented? You don’t think I’m smart? You don’t see anything else?’ It was a weird headspace to be in. Once I got comfortable with being seen and having my voice heard, I was able to speak on things that I believed in.”
Key in this was standing up for herself and other Black models in the industry. “ I remember seeing all the Black girls backstage my first season and everyone’s hair was getting destroyed because no one knew what to do with our hair and we were all crying because of the pain. They would tug and rip our hair out like we weren’t human. Sometimes my head would bleed. And the hairstylist would just call me a ‘drama queen’.” She reveals this experience with a chilling numbness, but one can still detect the traces of pain. “I first met Anok years ago,” says Jawara. “She was super-young and super-vibrant and has always been beautiful. After seeing her a few times backstage I felt like she was going through things that I saw a lot of models of colour go through with their hair, and I took her aside and said: ‘I got you.’ That started a bond of nurture and care that continues to this day.”
Speaking up came with risks. “ Everyone was scared,” she says. “The industry loves when there’s a Black girl they can call a bitch.” She started refusing to have her hair straightened, but at one major fashion show she was forced. “ There were multiple hairstylists straightening my hair at once… and then I wiped my tears and they pushed me out.” Experiences like that hardened her resolve. “I became more aggressive in my stance. Other Black girls would be like, ‘How did you do that?’ And I would say, ‘Just tell them you want to walk with an Afro or have braids.’ If they were too scared to go alone, I would go with them and hold their hand through it.”
There were penalties. “It caused a lot of tension between me and a lot of people in the industry,” she admits, mentioning no names. “They started being like: ‘Oh, Anok is starting to get into the hard-to-work-with area, she’s pushing it,’” she says in a mock singsong voice. In time, Afros and cornrows did become de rigueur at shows and on set, but popularity came with its own problems. “Yeah,” says Yai ruefully. “It kind of backfired on me. I would get my hair braided maybe four times a week and after a while when anyone touched my head it felt like it was on fire. Then my hair just started falling out. That’s when I decided to shave my head.” Still, she has no regrets. “There has been a huge change in the industry,” she says, though it remains far from perfect. “I don’t want to be negative but I’ve seen the very, very dark parts of fashion.”
There are people who give her hope: she namechecks stylist Carlos Nazario and designers Maximilian Davis at Ferragamo and Matthieu Blazy at Chanel. Post-surgery, her first appearance on the runway was at the latter’s a/w ’26 show. “I was so nervous about walking the length of that [notoriously long] runway. I thought, ‘What if I collapse in the middle of it?’ Thankfully,” she adds with a smile, “it was all fine.”
The next day we meet at Chinatown Fair, the gritty, legendary video arcade in New York’s Chinatown that was the subject of cult 2016 documentary The Lost Arcade. It is an assault on the senses, a cacophony of whirring, high-pitched sounds and bursts of digitised noises. Aside from the odd lone figure fixated on a screen, the graffitied space is empty. “Usually friends and I come here after the shows. By then we really don’t want to do anything remotely fashion related,” explains Yai, today wearing an old khaki baseball cap, baggy jeans and a shearling-lined Miu Miu (again) zip-up. “My favourite game is Dance Dance Revolution.” We buy a ticket. The machine is broken, no staff in sight. So we don’t dance, we simply perch against a game close to the doorway watching the comings and goings of Mott Street.
I ask her what it’s like as a woman of colour, a Sudanese woman, living in America right now. Yai doesn’t miss a beat. “It’s scary,” she responds, matter of fact. “I mean we are citizens and I’ve dealt with racism. But, I don’t know, with Ice being around and basically kidnapping people… yeah. It makes me scared.” She hasn’t considered leaving. “That’s never crossed my mind but I have always wanted to have a house in South Sudan.”
At the 2025 British Fashion Awards – recognising the dissonance of standing in a room full of fashion’s most influential and exquisitely dressed while a war and humanitarian crisis devastated her homeland – she gave a tearful but powerful speech. “For those watching, I ask you not to look away. My family is dying and I don’t know what to do.” She was last in South Sudan in 2024, visiting family and doing philanthropic work. “ I was able to visit two orphanages and I donated a lot of supplies. I want to do anything I can to help my country.” Recalling the experience, she suddenly smiles. “When I went, I brought the truck filled with necessities for the kids: diapers, food supplies, backpacks, and the kids were like, “OK, gurl, we don’t care. Where’s the candy?” She chuckles warmly. “They. Did. Not. Care.”
She faces a high-wire act known well to too many: how to balance speaking out on issues to do with race as an immigrant while not allowing that to become the narrative that defines her. “ It’s a double-edged sword,” she agrees. “When a person of colour gets to a successful position, they are now the face of people of colour. They have to advocate for everyone. I remember once complaining, ‘Why can’t a girl just go and be fab? Why does it have to be political?’ But the moment I started in the industry, I was like, ‘If I ever get to the point where I have a say in things or I have any power, I want to use it.’” She generally doesn’t have an issue with the immigrant narrative but would like it to loosen its grip. “ The world has been holding onto that story so tight. Whenever I would do interviews, they’d be like [her expression now comically exaggerated]: ‘So we heard you used to be poor? What was it like being poor?’” Still, she recognises two things can be true at once. “It is the overarching narrative because, yes, I came from nothing and now it’s like I’m on top of the world and I am in a position where I can take care of my family.” (She told me earlier that she just bought a house, currently being renovated, for her parents. “ I don’t know if my mom’s going to like the furniture because I have quite specific, strange taste,” she says with a laugh.)
We are now standing outside waiting for a taxi to take her home. She still requires intervals of rest. Before we part ways, she jokingly reminds me to make sure I make her sound better on paper. She is, I assure her, already divinely eloquent. She chuckles. “I remember when I first started modelling, people would be like, ‘Hello. I. Am. Hairstylist. You. Come. Do. Hair.’ And I was like, ‘Gurl, I’m from New Hampshire.’”
Back on set in Paris, an unapologetically robust Beyoncé playlist – from “Baby Boy” to “Energy” – is blaring. Studio assistants move with a quiet urgency to assemble the set. Caterers lay out an improbably abundant breakfast. Spread across the studio is a deliriously kaleidoscopic inventory of the season’s most coveted clothes: glittering, feathered, unabashedly maximalist pieces gathered into a kind of sartorial spread of eye candy.
In the dressing room, Yai’s father is sitting, smartly dressed in a grey suit, drinking coffee while his wife and daughter get their hair and make-up done. To one side of the long dressing table a line of wigs, created by Jawara, are waiting for their moment. Yai clocks them and grins. “Yasss,” she says, delighted, theatrically drawing the word out.
Yai, unsurprisingly, has a renewed vigour for life. “I am working out every day, doing Pilates, trying to run again…” She’s also painting more. “I’d like my art to become a cultural phenomenon.” For now, however, Yai is preparing for her close-up. And the model of the year has a mantra for the day. “You need to make me look like a baaaad bitch,” she says, smiling. “That’s the look I’m going for.”
Cover look: Hand-crocheted minidress and shearling hat, Bottega Veneta. Leather shoes, Phoebe Philo. Hair: Jawara. Make-up: Peter Philips. Nails: Anatole Rainey. Tailor: Nicolas Guichard. Set design: Mary Howard. Production: North Six.