Lupita wows on this gorgeous cover for
Vogue. She also talks about some life experiences that has brought her to this day -
"Her first memory of fashion was at age five, wearing her �very eighties red cord miniskirt with suspender straps. Presentation is extremely important in Kenya. You dress formally. You can�t just wear flip-flops. My mother always had her own style. She wore A-line, tea-length flowery dresses, very well fitting. Her nails were always perfectly done.� As a girl in Nairobi, Lupita recalls, �salons were a big feature in my life. We would go every two weeks to get our hair braided, washed, or treated. That�s where I read American, British, and a few African magazines.Then I would design my own clothes. In Kenya it�s much cheaper to get clothes made than to buy them. We would have everything run up by a tailor, or my aunt Kitty, who is very creative, would sew things for me.�
It may seem an unlikely combination, but politics were as ever-present in the Nyong�o household as style. Lupita�s father, Peter Anyang� Nyong�o, now a senator, was for a long period an opposition politician under the repressive Moi regime. He spent three years in self-imposed exile with his family in Mexico, where Lupita was born.
The Nyong�os returned to Nairobi when Lupita was one. The following years she remembers as �scary, but I was at an age where you couldn�t fully understand what was happening.� Her father was at times detained in jail, once for an entire month, and the family �had to destroy a lot of his documents. I wasn�t allowed to go to school. We were basically locked up in the house. The curtains were shut all the time, and we were just burning papers.� She says the experience made her resilient. �I was definitely exposed to some extreme situations. Tragedy is something that I have known and that I have tried to accept as part of life. But I don�t dwell on it. . . . � Read the full article here.
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