Alex Consani Is Having More Fun than Anyone in Fashion

Reported by Harper's Bazaar.

Alex Consani dropped a Hermès Kelly Pochette into the ocean in Jamaica and jumped in after it. "It got taken out to sea, but it's kind of fab," she says, laughing. The bag survived. So did she. That particular combination — careless luxury, complete unbothered-ness, and a body built for a runway — is basically the whole Consani thesis.

According to Harper's Bazaar, the 21-year-old is currently the face of McQueen, Gucci, YSL Beauty, and Tory Burch, and has walked for Chanel, Jean Paul Gaultier, Marc Jacobs, and the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show in a single season. She was named 2024 Model of the Year at the Fashion Awards — the first trans woman to hold the title — and is adding A24 film credits and a Ryan Murphy series to the list before anyone's had time to update her Wikipedia page. McQueen creative director Seán McGirr calls her "a master of her own craft." Haider Ackermann, who directs Tom Ford, says "the world seems to lean in" the moment she walks into a room. Adam Selman at Victoria's Secret puts it most plainly: "She has built an empire" — and makes it look effortless, which he's quick to note is a skill of its own.

The Algorithm Didn't Make Her. She Made the Algorithm Work.

Consani didn't arrive through the traditional gatekeeping channels. She built her audience first — nine million followers across multiple TikTok accounts (@bannedbarbie, @captincroook, @ms.mawma) and 4.3 million on Instagram — through viral dance breaks, absurdist humor, and rap lip-syncs that would have gotten a model blacklisted five years ago. She signed with Slay at 12, made her runway debut for Tom Ford in 2021 after moving to IMG Models, and brought the same unfiltered personality that built her online following straight onto the Rue Cambon. Born in Petaluma, California in 2003 and raised by parents who, by her own account, had to do real work to unlearn assumptions and show up for her as a trans girl, Consani credits trans women before her — including Dominique Jackson, who she modeled alongside at Slay — as the foundation everything else was built on.

What makes her genuinely interesting isn't the résumé, which at this point practically writes itself. It's that she shows up to meetings on a bike that needs repairs, stuffed in the back of an SUV she borrowed for a job, wearing four-year-old Icon Denim she describes with genuine affection as "nasty." The Hermès pochette is ocean-damaged. The Givenchy shirt is on backwards, by design. She wanted Matthieu Blazy's shoes and got told no. Even the model in the Chanel show waits in line at Rue Cambon, apparently.

Fashion has always rewarded a certain performance of effortlessness — but Consani's version is rarer because it's not performance at all.

Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.