Supermodel Adut Akech is now an Estee Lauder global ambassador, joining other famous women like Karlie Kloss, Carolyn Murphy, Anok Yai and Ana de Armas in a role that is a truly prestigious and long-lasting business and human-values relationship. Estee Lauder is known for paying ambassadors very well and this new achievement for Akech will help to cement her financial future.

Adut Akech Understands Ubuntu

At age 21, Adut has mastered the art of — or is innately gifted in — speaking to activist values with honesty and grace. Consciously or unconsciously, Adut embraces ‘ubuntu’. The Zulu concept of ‘ubuntu’ — expressed Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu — literally means that a person is a person through other people.

Condensed “ubuntu’ is a concept that believes 'I am because of who we all are’ — and that includes you, too. As members of the human family, we don’t live in silos apart from each other, but connected to and impacted by each other’s values and actions. I feel your love and it helps me thrive, and I also feel your hate or indifference which can be spiritually, psychologically and physically crushing.

Now 21 and stepping up as an Estee Lauder ambassador, Adut Akech is the representation she once sought for herself as a young woman of color. "It means a lot to me, because this is something that I never saw – it's something that I never thought I would be able to do," she says. "Even though I had wished and dreamed to do it, I didn’t see it. And now in the position I'm in, I get to be that representation – someone for others to look up to."

Adut Akekch’s Fashion Family Includes Naomi Campbell and Edward Enninful

AOC has followed Adut Akech from her initial arrival in the world of modeling, walking the Saint Laurent show in 2016 as an exclusive two-season model. Akech is a member of the large contingent of models born in South Sudan, but then fleeing with her family as a refugee first in Kenya’s Kakuma camp in northwestern Kenya and then on to Australia.

Adut Akech is very close to Naomi Campbell, often referring to her as her “second mother.” When Adut moved to New York, their bond became even closer. “I’d go to her apartment, and we’d have lunch or dinner,” Akech told Grazia in May 2019. “She would give me so much advice. Since then, our relationship has just grown and grown. She was the first family I had in New York.”

Discussing working with the next generation of models, including during the Saint Laurent show in Paris in September 2019, Campbell said: “I came off the runway at Saint Laurent and who is waiting for me? Kaia [Gerber] and Adut [Akech]. They were like ‘Mama you did so good!!’”

Adut is also very close to British Vogue’s editor-in-chief Edward Enninful, calling him her “fashion dad” early in 2021, but even more intimately in the past “papa”.

AOC is known as the most dedicated to following all the models of color — and definitely the refugee models — because of my own past work in Sudan.

“I’m a citizen of the world,” Adut says, “but my identity is South Sudanese before anything.” Adut Akech radiates 'hope’ for a better world, embracing ‘ubuntu’ in its deepest and most spiritual meaning.

For this reason, AOC is thrilled that Adut Akech is our first ‘For the World’ person, honoring in words, actions and deeds the principles of ubuntu. Learn much more about Adut in the world of fashion and also the world of global values — positive and negative — in her Anne of Carversville model archives.

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