Adonis Bosso and Jazzelle On Changing the Modern Definition of “Model”
Owning their uniqueness is what pushed our March cover stars to the top of the modelling game.
Adonis Bosso was in the priority line to board a recent flight from Paris when the gate agent waved him away. “‘I’m SkyPriority,’ I said as I showed her my pass,” he recalls. “And she looked at me like, ‘Really?’” That’s just one example of the daily micro-aggressions Bosso says he faces as a Black man. But speaking via Zoom from his home in Toronto, where he was quarantining after returning from FASHION’s cover shoot in Los Angeles, he conveys the incident with such nonchalance, and such a lack of anger or bitterness, that it’s clear that racism is as routine to him as brushing his teeth.
He also faced it, though in a more systemic way, when he began modelling in the early 2010s. “I would often be the only Black model in a show or campaign,” says Bosso, who is casually dressed in