Packing for Paris With Alex Consani

Photo: OK McCausland

I’m kind of slutty, so when I’m wearing clothes, I’m not wearing that much,” says the model Alex Consani, stuffing a bunch of miniskirts into a tiny carry-on. In a couple of hours, the 20-year-old is heading to Couture Week in Paris, and though she doesn’t know what time she boards, or what airport she’s flying out of, or whether she’s even walking in any of the shows yet, she doesn’t seem stressed out. It’s tempting to try to mother her. Her Brooklyn apartment is decorated with little more than a fake house plant taken off the curb (“It had cat litter in it,” she says, “so I put it in the shower and scrubbed it with my bodywash”) and a Wii console. Of course, she has America’s Next Top Model the video game, which she describes as “sick, sick.”

Consani looks like what you’d expect a model to look like: bleach blonde, willowy thin, a little over six feet tall — “I’m a taaaaalllllll biiiiiiitch. I’m a real she-male bitch!” she tells me — with a face just unique enough to stand out from the rest of the blonde, skinny, angular girls on the runway. She also happens to be probably the busiest trans model working at this exact moment, having, in barely three years, walked for Alexander McQueen, Versace, Burberry, Chloé, Thom Browne, Ludovic de Saint Sernin, Marc Jacobs, and Givenchy.

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Consani arrived in the city by way of the Bay Area, where she grew up with a younger brother and parents whose job titles she doesn’t remember. She tells me, vaguely, that her “Slavic European diva” mother works in “water conservation” and her dad works with Guide Dogs for the Blind. “They’re real as fuck,” she says. They were also incredibly supportive of her when, at age 8, she came out as trans. They sent her to trans summer camp, where she says she met many of the other “dolls” she now works with in fashion. “My mom gave me resources,” she says. “It was always like, ‘Here’s the information about what being queer is. Do you think you relate with this?’ I will literally credit her with all of the success I’ve had.” When she first expressed an interest in modeling as a tween, her mother signed her to a trans-focused Los Angeles–based agency, which she had discovered in a Facebook ad. By the time she was 16, she was signed worldwide with IMG Models. “That’s really good,” her model friend, who’s hanging out in the other room on a beanbag, says to educate me.

In high school — she graduated in 2021 — she started TikToking (under @ms.mawma and @captincroook) as a “COVID hobby.” It took off. Before long, she had thousands, then hundreds of thousands (now 2.2 million) of followers who love watching her, basically, be a hot mess. Consani’s best videos involve her being very loud and sort of annoying in very public spaces. In one, she rides the subway wearing almost nothing and screaming, “So why nobody else dressed like a slut tonight?!” In another, she belts out Rihanna’s “Where Have You Been” (she knows she’s not a great singer or a great dancer — she is all noodly arms and legs) in front of startled onlookers along the sidewalk. Her videos are constantly going viral — people seem to delight in the fact that one minute she’s sauntering down the runway in Simone Rocha and the next acting like a menace on the street in something she picked up at a thrift store (“The duality of woman,” reads one tweet appreciating this).

After Consani graduated in 2021, she moved to New York and started school at Pace; after she made her debut for Tom Ford the same year, she dropped out. Being a busy girl and all, she’s also put dating on pause: “If I can still have fun, and get my dickings, I don’t need to be cuffed. Let me wait until I find my Prince Charming.”

VERSACE Denim Pant, at select Versace boutiques. Photo: OK McCausland

Last year, she walked as a Victoria’s Secret Angel alongside Hailey Bieber and Gigi Hadid. “That was so fierce. Victoria’s Secret as a trans person — I never thought that would be something that would ever be in my books.” Inevitably, she made a TikTok backstage while sitting in hair and makeup: “You know what the fuck is good, yes! Transsexuals rise … The girls are gonna be serving down.” On that note: “I’m crazy on set. I don’t know how people don’t take my phone away.”

When I ask her what it’s like to really be a model, three years in, she tells me the main thing she’s learned is that “the more you work the more you realize it’s not as high echelon, upper echelon, as the internet and society make it seem.” And sometimes she wonders if her confident persona obfuscates the fact that she is still a 20-year-old living on her own for the first time, trying to figure out how to save her money and make friends. “I think that’s one thing people misinterpret from me online — that I don’t have any insecurities. I’m a human, girl. I’m anxious,” she says. Her friend calls out from the beanbag: “She’s an amazing, incredible girl, and she doesn’t give herself as much credit as she should.” “Thanks, queen,” Consani responds.

Her favorite part of the job, she says completely seriously, is all the people she’s met along the way. The two of them just got back from a trip with a dozen of their fashion friends to the Bahamas on an all-inclusive Royal Caribbean cruise, sleeping three girls to one queen bed and spending most of their time hanging around in “crazy skimpy-ass clothes” and smoking cigs in the casino. Most of them work as models. The one who doesn’t they refer to as the “normal girl” with the “regular job.”

With that, I leave her to finish her packing. “For all of Fashion Month, I only bring this one carry-on,” she says, throwing in a Mugler scarf.

There’s a lot to look forward to when she touches down in Paris. “I have two fittings, a shoot, and a dick appointment,” she tells me, smirking about her planned hookup. “They’re more down for the dolls in Europe.”