the only model working this season, apparently

Noor Khan. If you've walked through a department store or an airport lately you've probably seen her face and had no idea what her name was. That was me.

The joke going around in Korean fashion talk right now is "is she the only model left in the industry," and honestly the numbers make it a fair joke. She's Swedish-Pakistani, she walked 25 shows this fashion month, and 9 of those were the opening or closing spot. She closed Louis Vuitton, which was the very last show of the week, closed Hermès, and opened Sacai, Victoria Beckham, Max Mara, Fendi, COS and Michael Kors. That's an opening or closing roughly every third show. For comparison, people pointed out that even Choi Sora gets maybe 2 or 3 in a really good season.

The fun part is she didn't start like this. For her first year she was only doing a couple of shows at a time, then Prada and Saint Laurent locked her in as an exclusive for a year. That ended last year and now she's making up for lost time, and honestly I respect it. The Korean comments were mostly about her face, which is very androgynous. A lot of people admitted they thought she was a guy at first, others said she has that expensive, classic look where every photo seems like a different person. One person just said she's going to be scooping up money, which, yes. So is it hype? Not really. Hype is when everyone says a name and nobody books her. Here the brands are literally putting her first and last. The only hype in this story is me thinking I could pull off that curly hair on my walk to the mailbox.