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MILAN (AP) – Somali-American model Halima Aden has announced that she is taking a step back from the fashion industry, saying the downturn in the pandemic has allowed her to see instances where her desire to maintain a hijab was not properly respected.
In a detailed Instagram story, Aden wrote this week that she “isn’t rushing into the fashion industry” and has finally heard her mother’s calls “to open her eyes.”
“My mom asked me to quit modeling a long time ago. I wish I hadn’t been so defensive, ”the 23-year-old model wrote. “Thanks to COVID and the separation of the industry, I finally realized where I went wrong on my hijab trip. ”
Aden became the first model to wear the hijab on the catwalks in Milan and New York, and has appeared on numerous magazine covers and in print campaigns.
Born in a refugee camp in Kenya, she moved to the United States with her family at the age of 7 and was the first Muslim queen to return to her high school in Minnesota, the first Somali student to be a senator at her university and the first woman wearing the hijab in the Miss USA Minnesota pageant.
In her Instagram posts, Aden detailed where she felt the religious covering hijab had been respected – for example in a campaign for Rihanna’s Fenty beauty line – and where it got lost, showing an example where her head had gone. been wrapped in jeans.
“I was so desperate at the time for any ‘performance’ that I lost touch with who I was,” she wrote on one message, and on another, wearing a scarf encrusted with crystals, she said “” I should have left the set because clearly the stylist didn’t have a woman wearing the hijab in mind.
She said her acceptance of situations that showed disrespect for her beliefs was due to a mixture of rebellion and naivety. “What I blame the industry for is the lack of MUSLIM stylists,” she writes.
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