A Quote by Godfrey Gao
After I grew some facial hair, I looked a bit older, and I guess that's what the modeling world wanted because I started booking more luxury brands.
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Most brands that are called luxury brands today are not true luxury brands. The globalization of fashion and luxury means you now find the same luxury brands in every city. The stores look the same, the products are the same. It is still a very good quality product but it is now readily available to everyone. It's a kind of mass luxury.
I always had the facial hair so I looked older than I was.
As for facial hair, I think I decided it was a good look after graduate school. I always shave it myself and trim my own beard. I change the look depending on the role. For 'Million Dollar Baby,' I had no facial hair. For 'Men in Black 3,' I had no facial hair but did wear a wig.
I started modeling myself on [ Buckminster Fuller], like with the hair. I reached an age where I sort of, kind of, looked like him a little bit, you know? I thought it was great.
I know some brands second-guess working with me because I'm a boy that likes makeup. I think brands shouldn't just appreciate boys that wear makeup, but they should embrace it. And I feel like some brands forget they need personality. I have plenty of it.
I started modeling when I was about 2 or 3 years old; I started with Baby Guess, and I did Guess Kids, and that was the extent of my modeling career as a kid. I took all of my elementary, middle and high school years off to focus on school and sports.
I like doing the editorial stuff because it's nice to do something that's more me. But modeling for brands and the things to make money... I guess I don't really like being the mannequin. It's a very strange concept.
I'm in a really nice position because I can be selective with the modeling jobs that I do and just work with brands I'm passionate about. The two worlds balance out nicely for me because modeling is so social - it has travel, you meet people, it's extroverted. Whereas painting is very solitary - when I paint, I'm kind of in my own world.
As I got older, I started to do it more and more, and I wanted to learn all of the different types. I grew up doing modern, so I wanted to learn ballet, tap, jazz, and African - just everything.
I actually started modeling in Ethiopia, because that's where I grew up, and I started out by just doing little fashion shows for school, and I liked it so much that I started pursuing it.
Sometimes I feel fashion is not open-minded enough. We need to push the old crowd to believe in what I believe, in the new generation. I remember when I started, my campaigns and and how I connected my love for music with fashion were a tiny bit controversial because they were like, 'How can you bring hip-hop or music into a luxury world?' or 'How you can be so connected to digital and use social media in luxury world?' Now it's changed, obviously, for the best, but I still think that we could push a bit more.
It really all started in Buffalo, when it was cold, I wanted to see if I could grow facial hair and lo and behold it just kept growing.
All brands, whether high-ticket luxury ones such as Cartier or Rolls-Royce or 'masstige' ones with luxe-y overtones but altogether more affordable, all want to grow. Even brands that may have started in a modestly niche design and lifestyle fashion can find themselves under pressure to go global or to sell out at the top.
Maybe it's genetics, I've been lucky enough to grow some facial hair. A bit of oil here and there and a trim up, but there's not a lot to it.
I hate tricky facial hair. If your facial hair is too spotty in places, shave. Just forget about it.
It was hard at school because, growing up, some people wanted to be friends with me just because they wanted to get to my dad and say that they had met him and had gone to our house. I didn't understand it at the time, but the older I got and the more aware of it I became, it started becoming hard.
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