Super Adut Akech shares part two of a joint fashion story, leaving Vogue Italia behind for Vogue France’s interpretation called ‘Adut in Pantelleria’. Vogue Spain will weigh in as well in the coming days. Imruh Asha styles Adut in images by Vito Fernicola [IG]./ Hair by Ramona Eschbach; makeup by Patrick Glatthaar

Related: Adut Akech Covers Vogue Italia June 2022 'Mediterraneo' Focus AOC Fashion

The location of the Vogue Mediteraneo mothership shoot with Adut is Tenuta Borgia in the heart of Pantelleria Island National Park.

We are reluctant to criticize the shared content approach when Vogues and all magazines are facing a financial crisis. Period. What I will say is that I don’t have any real sense of the Mediterranean magic promoted in the Vogue narrative about the three-countries media collab.

If you’ve spent some of the best days of your life in this region, expectations run high. Mine are probably not normal, so take my thoughts for their actual value.

Additionally, AOC and I personally are deeply invested in racial justice, multi-culturalism, the rise of so-called Western civilization, slave ships and the demonization of women.

Adut’s personal story as a refugee out of South Sudan, and onto Adelaide, Australia, before being scooped up in her meteoric rise as a top global fashion model is rooted in this history.

Reading about Tenuta Borgia on the website, this incomplete phrase caught my attention: ‘“From a terrace, the view of an absolute sea that sometimes at sunset smells a little of Africa” (Alberto Coretti) 100 meters away from the sea as the crow flies.” ‘

That reference would be modern-day Tunisia in North Africa — far away from Adut’s homeland of modern-day South Sudan, given the immense size of the African continent. Still, I thought of Adut’s life trajectory and how she had come full-circle in that moment where she posed in Tenuta Borgia with the coast of North Africa so close she could perhaps smell it.

Reading about Tenuta Borgia, it seems that even on the working farm, there were locations, props and perhaps even people or two that could have better grounded the fashion story in a remarkable place one with a deep history and ties to the modern world as we know it.

As the story stands, it’s no place special.

When I read the description of what the Vogue Mediterraneo issue seeks to accomplish, I was inspired. In this moment, I’m underwhelmed not with any one person, but rather with the big-picture visual execution and lack of silent narrative seeping into the images.

It’s a tall order — the way my mind works in these matters. While AOC understands and supports the shared content approach in our modern media crisis, it actually raises expectations around the final product. If we give up the high expectations entirely, there’s an entirely new problem called “who needs it?”

AOC is following the Vogue France-Italy-Spain collaboration online and will do everything we can do to promote all the content that supports a positive view of the effort. No more criticism. Still, I am a bit sad when considering the deep history and stories buried in these places like Tenuta Borgia.

Of course, the French have criticized me lovingly before for being too serious about fashion. This goes WAY back!! LOL. For them, it’s just ‘water off a duck’s back”, as we say in America.

So I probably have no right to expect more from these creators all the way up the Vogue hierarchy path to London and New York . . . but I do. ~ Anne