SHE is the lone South Asian face strutting catwalks in the West. Model Lakshmi Menon’s profile got a further boost when US Vogue booked her for a 12-page shoot in this month’s issue of the magazine. This is a first for an Indian model.
“Everyone around me was pretty thrilled about the whole thing,” she told British newspaper The Independent.
“But I didn’t realise until a few weeks ago when my agent said to me, ‘Do you know how big this is?’ Your first solo editorial in US Vogue has huge prestige, I believe.”
Vogue is not the only magazine that has cast its eyes on the 26-year-old model.
London stylist Nicola Formichetti picked her for the cover of last month’s Dazed & Confused magazine.
She thinks Menon is the “girl of the season... personifying the powerful modern woman”. Vogue India has put her on the cover twice already, describing her look as “unique and arresting”.
Menon started modelling to earn pocket money while she was a student of psychology at Jyoti Nivas College in Bangalore. She began her international career in 2006, after several years of modelling in India and is the only Indian model regularly seen on the runways in New York and Paris.
Last year, she told The Hindu about how she is viewed in the West: “I look at myself as any other model. But yes, sometimes I’m looked upon as an exotic thing that’s landed on their shores.”
She moved from Bangalore to Goa because she did not like the traffic jams in the city but now spends most of her time in New York due to her modelling assignments.
Why the interest in her in the US?
She attributes the sudden spike in American interest in non-Caucasian girls to US president Barack Obama’s election. The launch of Vogue India in 2007 has also been a factor, she thinks: “Being part of Condé Nast, all the Vogue magazines are circulated within the company so US Vogue sees what’s going on in India and vice versa,” she told The Independent.
She thinks that India’s spot in the limelight has been a long time coming.
“You see groups of girls from certain countries who dominate the business for a period of time – the Brazilians, the Russians – it would be great to see
something like that for Indian girls,” she says.
“And it’s about time, I guess, given the way in which India is opening up as a new market.
It would be only fair to have representation.”
