Meet the pink-haired, Chinese Australian model taking the fashion industry by storm
Fernanda Ly has arrived on a wave of Asian models who are increasingly making their mark on Western fashion and beauty. With four, soon to be five, covers of Vogue under her belt, she is fast becoming an industry favourite
A teenager 1.7 metres (5 feet 7 inches) tall with a mane of My Little Pony hair doesn’t automatically scream “future superstar”. Yet an equally petite – for a model – London waif by the name of Kate Moss caught the eye of Storm Models’ Sarah Doukas at New York’s JFK Airport in 1988. And in the same way, there was something about 17-year-old, pink-haired Chinese Australian Fernanda Ly that immediately grabbed Doll Wright, director of Priscillas Model Management, in Sydney in 2013.
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Ly, now 22, is now one of the biggest international success stories in Australian modelling over the past three years. She has campaigns for Louis Vuitton, Dior and Kate Spade under her belt and has been featured on four, soon to be five, Vogue covers.
Her modelling career began after she was spotted in The Galeries shopping centre on Sydney’s George Street by a stylist, who asked if she’d ever considered modelling. The then 17-year-old high school student from Sydney’s western suburbs sent in some images to Priscillas and was signed on the spot – much to the horror of her parents.
“They’re happy for me now because obviously I’ve made it, but in the beginning it was [considered] an unacceptable sort of thing. They’re very traditional,” says Ly of her parents, who migrated to Australia from Vietnam in the 1980s.
Wright had just returned home from a four-and-a-half year stint in New York working for Ford Models and Elite Model Management, and was on the lookout for the Australian industry’s next big thing. “I thought, ‘wow’ – I loved everything about her, her clothes, her look,” she says.