Anok Yai has said that at her school in New Hampshire, she was treated as the ugliest girl. “They called me ‘gorilla’ and ‘Tarzan'”, she told Glamour UK in June 2026.
Her father kept telling her that what people said didn’t matter, because she was intelligent. She was born in Cairo in 1997 to South Sudanese parents and came to the United States at the age of three. At 19, she was studying biochemistry at Plymouth State University and had about 300 followers on Instagram.
Everything changed at a Howard homecoming, even though she didn’t study at the university. “I only went to look for cute guys”, she told British Vogue. Photographer Steve Hall took her picture and posted it the next morning. In one week, her following grew from 300 to 50,000.
Next Model Management signed her on October 31, 2017. When she told her mother that she had landed Prada, her mother asked: “And what is Prada?”. In February 2018, she opened the brand’s show, becoming only the second Black model to do so after Naomi Campbell.
On October 18, 2026, she walked twice in the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show in Los Angeles: first in a pink petal look and then in white lace and high feathered wings. On social media, they called her “the definition of an angel”.
