Aya Jones

[iheartfashion]

Marc Jacobs - NYFW SS18 Show

[Sunshiine]

SPRING 2018 READY-TO-WEAR Public School (HQs)

sources: vogue + theimpression

[Sunshiine]

SPRING 2018 READY-TO-WEAR Prabal Gurung

sources: vogue + theimpression

[Sunshiine]

SPRING 2018 READY-TO-WEAR Marc Jacobs (HQs)

sources: vogue + theimpression

[Vladadoll]

RUNWAY - Dolce & Gabbana SS18 

[Sunshiine]

SPRING 2018 READY-TO-WEAR Blumarine

sources: vogue + theimpression

[Sunshiine]

SPRING 2018 READY-TO-WEAR Salvatore Ferragamo

sources: vogue + theimpression

[Sunshiine]

SPRING 2018 READY-TO-WEAR Dolce & Gabbana (HQs)

sources: vogue + theimpression

[Sunshiine]

SPRING 2018 READY-TO-WEAR Off-White

sources: vogue + theimpression

[Sunshiine]

SPRING 2018 READY-TO-WEAR Alexander McQueen

sources: vogue + theimpression

[Sunshiine]

SPRING 2018 READY-TO-WEAR Miu Miu

sources: vogue + theimpression

[Sunshiine]

Vogue US December 2017
Photographer: Mario Testino
Fashion Editor: Lucinda Chambers
Hair: Christiaan
Make Up: Yadim

 

source: wearesodroee

[Sunshiine]

Mango Before Midnight Campaign 2017

Photographed by Dan Martensen

 

source: fashiongonerogue

[Vladadoll]

New interview with Vogue for their January 2018 issue (ph. by Patrick Demarchelier)

 

 

Aya Jones remembers nothing of the accident that changed her life. It was August 27, 2016. The Paris-born model and her then boyfriend were enjoying the last days of a three-week vacation in Thailand. She was piloting a Jet Ski through crystalline waters off the coast of Ko Phangan, a tiny island ringed with white sand beaches and notorious for its monthly Full Moon Parties, which attract hordes of all-night revelers.

 

The next thing she recalls is waking from a morphine-induced haze in a private hospital in Bangkok. Her mother, who had flown in from Paris; her brother, two years older, who had cut short his vacation in Australia to be with her; and her boyfriend, who had fished her broken body out of the Gulf of Thailand, explained what had happened. A speedboat ferrying hotel guests to the beach had hit her Jet Ski, puncturing her lung and stomach, fracturing her arm, leg, pelvis, and cranium. After an emergency operation on the neighboring island of Ko Samui, she had been transferred by plane (flying at low altitude because of her cracked skull) to Bangkok, where more operations would follow. She had just emerged from two weeks in intensive care. The fact that she had survived at all was a miracle.

 

“My first thought was the unfairness of it all,” the model, now 23, said over lunch at a macrobiotic restaurant in SoHo. A faint shadow passes over the soft beauty of her heart-shaped face, with its bee-stung lips and the widely spaced eyes that give her the look of a wild fawn. “I thought, Why did this happen to me; why was I in that place on that day? And then I had a very strong feeling of revolt,” she says. “I wanted to fight and get over it.”

 

A few close friends, from the fashion world and beyond, had sent messages for her birthday on September 5, unaware that Aya was then on a respirator, struggling to breathe. A couple of weeks later, she was able to text back, telling them she’d had an accident. The whirl of Fashion Weeks in New York, London, Milan, and Paris, with their fittings, shows, and parties that had determined the rhythm of her young life for several seasons, was happening without her.

 

Even before the crash, she wasn’t accustomed to sharing casual snaps from her private life on Instagram. Aya is très pudique, a French phrase that means at once “shy, modest, and reserved.” In France the trait, increasingly rare in our show-and-tell-all culture, is traditionally considered a virtue.

 

As I marvel at the graceful, self-possessed young woman sitting across from me at lunch, who has emerged with body and soul—and career—intact from a trial that might well have shattered anyone else, it occurs to me that this reserve might be one key to her incredible resilience. In any case, after the accident her Instagram account went dark for weeks, with her 86,000 fans wondering what had become of her.

 

Aya Jones, a Parisienne, grew up in the city’s Eleventh Arrondissement, amid the neighborhood’s hubbub of West and North African immigrant cultures. For 25 years her family has run a restaurant, A La Banane Ivoirienne, where her father cooks the cuisine of his homeland, the Ivory Coast. The family still lives nearby. As teenagers, Aya and her brother often helped out, serving on slow nights during the week.

 

Years of dance classes—first ballet and later jazz and hip-hop—helped hone the young girl’s innate suppleness and refined physicality. Swimming and gymnastics strengthened her. (All of these would later play a role in her recovery.) She was fearless, too, her floor routines in gymnastics filled with “perilous somersaults,” her mother, Béatrice, recalls on the phone from Paris, “that would make me catch my breath.”

 

In fact, despite her angelic, doll-like beauty, “I was always a bit ballsy,” Aya admits, laughing. “Later on, I loved the thrill of risky sports—Jet Ski, zip-line, all-terrain vehicles. Well, I’m done with those now.”

 

She’d just finished high school and was planning to study nursing when, while she was out shopping with a friend on the Rue de Rivoli, a modeling scout spotted her. After that, things moved quickly. New York–based casting director Ashley Brokaw put Aya in Prada’s spring 2015 show in Milan. It was a grand debut. “People really look to Prada for new faces,” Brokaw recalls, “and everybody took notice of Aya.”

 

What makes a particular set of features speak to our moment? For François Nars, it was Aya’s air of innocence, combined with untold reserves of strength, that made him cast her as the face of Nars Cosmetics for fall 2016. “It was a total look,” he said of the campaign, which had Aya sporting a gigantic Afro and channeling a young Diana Ross—a vision of empowered black beauty, at once up front and meltingly mysterious. “Much of the inspiration came from the seventies,” Nars said, “but Aya made it very fresh and new, very accurate for today.”

 

Just months after those pictures were shot, she lay in the hospital in Thailand, needing every ounce of her strength, and all the support of her close-knit family, to sustain her. Her mother, a retired physical therapist, was constantly by her side. “During the whole year of her recovery, I never heard her complain,” Béatrice recalls, “except when her brother left Thailand after two weeks. Then she cried for an hour.”

 

They watched silly movies: Les Tuche (a kind of French Beverly Hillbillies), or the films of François L’Embrouille (a Belgian comedian who plays tricks with candid cameras). In the face of agonizing doubts and questions, they stayed resolutely positive.

 

Aya kept up with fashion on social media. Was it difficult for her to watch her colleagues’ glamorous work and travel unspooling on Instagram? I ask. “No,” she insists. “I was happy for my friends,” including Imaan Hammam, Angel Rutledge, and Aamito Lagum. “Seeing their pictures gave me hope that soon we’d be together again.”

 

Back in Paris, it took five months for Aya’s bones to become strong enough to bear the weight of her body standing upright; she would spend another six months relearning how to walk. Hammam visited Aya in Paris in April. The two models had met on a photo shoot for Vogue in Los Angeles a few years earlier, and immediately connected through their shared love of music: hip-hop, rhythm and blues, and, especially, contemporary African music. (They are both big fans of the Nigerian singer/songwriter Wizkid.)

 

They had dinner at a restaurant. “My heart was so full, seeing Aya again,” Hammam says. “She was the same girl. She told me that she was trying to learn to walk in heels again. I had butterflies.”

 

One year to the day after her accident, Aya resumed work as a model, flying from Paris to Barcelona to shoot an advertising campaign for Mango. When we met in October, she had just sailed down top runways in New York, Milan, and Paris, including Miu Miu, Marc Jacobs, Dolce & Gabbana, and Alexander McQueen.

 

The scars on her right arm, leg, and stomach are easily camouflaged with makeup. Her range of motion has returned to normal. Despite the metal rods in her arm and leg, she’s still remarkably graceful. Her bookings calendar is full.

 

Aya’s determination to succeed has not wavered. “My role model, in the fashion world, is Naomi Campbell. The truth is, I want her career,” she admits, giggling a little at her own ferocious ambition. She has also begun taking acting lessons and admires Natalie Portman for “her combination of fragility and intelligence, softness and strength,” she says.

 

So what has changed for her? She’s lost the boyfriend, for one thing: He was supportive during her crisis but proved less reliable as her strength returned. “Right now,” she says, “I’m focusing on myself.” She loves travel, music, and hanging out with friends.

 

The main changes are inside her. “I know that I have the strength of character to handle whatever is thrown at me,” she says. “And I have 200 percent appreciation for little pleasures and moments of joy. I now know that life hangs by a thread—that everything can stop in a moment. So I’m more grateful than before.”

 

https://www.google.be/amp/s/www.vogue.com/article/aya-jones-model-interview-vogue-january-2018-issue/amp

[Sunshiine]

Vogue US February 2018

 

source: TFS

[Sunshiine]

Massimo Dutti S/S 2018 Ad Campaign

by Josh Olins

 

source: TFS

[Sunshiine]

FALL 2018 READY-TO-WEAR Tory Burch

sources: vogue + theimpression

[Vladadoll]

RUNWAY - Prabal Gurung Fall 2018, NYFW.

[Sunshiine]

 

[katchitup]

Happy she's back