Winnie Harlow: The Inspirational Story

In the fashion industry, there has been a disruptor of sorts among many pioneers lips called Chantelle Brown-Young aka Winnie Harlow. At age 4, a young Winnie Harlow was diagnosed with the rare skin condition ‘vitiligo’ which was made famous by the late Michael Jackson. Vitiligo is a disease that is mainly common among black people and it is a depigmentation of skin that causes the loss of skin colour in areas. Harlow and family, where distraught when she was diagnosed with this disease. Harlow returned to school and time passed by, however the depigmentation started to became increasingly visible. Her skin cells began to die at an extremely rapid rate. Harlow acknowledges that is was ‘really tough’ growing up as she was constantly bullied, beaten up and called names such as “zebra” and “milky”. As her condition became worse, she was constantly bullied which lead to her dropping out of middle-school.

After many years Harlow began to love her skin condition, she realised that she was going to have it for the rest of her life. So she embraced it and became spokeswoman vilitigo. In the last couple of years with the huge boom of social media marketing increased, Harlow saw it as an opportunity to expose herself to the world and create awareness for her disease. Currently, Harlow has over 638k followers on her Instagram account @winnieharlow and 22k on Twitter. With such a huge fan base, this attracted attention of runway model and TV personality Tyra Banks for the most recent season of America’s Next Top Model. Due to her 5ft10 and skinny frame, she seemed the perfect fit to be a runway model. As we know the fashion industry prides themselves on having models with symmetrical faces, an aspect of her Vitiligo which made her so unique is that the depigmentation is almost perfectly symmetrical from her face down.

Although Harlow was eliminated in Episode 4 of America’s Next Top Model, steaming from that exposure has lead her into runway appearances in Toronto’s Fashion Week, Marie Claire, Diesel, VH1, Margiela and many more. Winnie’s career doesn’t look like it is going to end anytime soon as she is expected to be featuring in New York Fashion Week, Paris Fashion Week and Milan’s Fashion week.

Harlow has completely transformed a negative into a positive.This is one of the most inspirational stories of all time, let alone to come out of the fashion industry. Harlow should be a huge encouragement to all when things aren’t going your way and you feel under pressure/depressed/unwanted, you should have the future in mind because it WILL turn around if you have persevere. We can apply this concept and frame of mind to all aspects of our lives.

Winnie Harlow, you are a true inspiration.