Rising model Duckie Thot gives a meaty interview to Michael Cuby in the Fall 2017 Beautiful People issue of Paper Magazine. Duckie covers the issue in stellar images by Paola Kudacki, ones that pay homage to the Australian-Sudanese model's stunning doll-like features now maximized in styling by Jason Rembert. Duckie herself has embraced what Twitter calls her Black Barbie features.

Cuby walks where angels dare not tread . . . a man's description of an always-articulate black woman's beauty:

Duckie's skin color is a large part of the reason her name has slowly (but, no doubt, surely) become a mainstay for the fashion set. It's a warm, mocha chocolate that's impossibly smooth and even-toned, and its dark hue is striking in a way that has made her simultaneously adored by casting agents looking for something radically different to the white industry norm and uplifted by the onlooking people of color observing -- and celebrating -- her increasingly rapid success.

Speaking of being a Black Barbie, Duckie responds: "Barbie is this perfect thing that walks around and I'm definitely not perfect. . . . "I'm so happy that people say that about me, because it basically is a lovely thing to be introduced to the world as this Black Barbie. I will take the title."

It seems that her reflections about her South Sudanese tribal roots animate her even more.

Thot's real first name is Nyadak -- her real last name is "Thot," something she openly acknowledges "everybody loves to throw shit on" — but she's been officially going by Duckie since she was six. In Melbourne, Australia, where she was born and raised in a culturally traditional Sudanese household with her mom, dad and six siblings, her peers at school couldn't pronounce her real name, and it got to an unbearable point. "I went insane! It drove me mental," she proclaims. Of course, neither name was something commonly found amongst Australian citizens. As she explains, both the words "Nyadak" and "Thot" are, in fact, Nuer, a South Sudanese language that's native to the Nuer tribe. "Oh yeah," she says wryly after noticing my surprised facial expression. "Many people don't know I come from a tribe."

Thot slaps down the story that she owes her modeling fame to Australia's Next Top Model. Her success is no accident, and the portrait of Duckie Thot emerging from her meaty Michael Cuby interview is one of a strategic-thinking, true grit woman. Read on at Paper Magazine.