As a child in a refugee camp, Rawdah Mohamed was allowed to buy one dress a year, for the festival of Eid. “I was obsessed by that dress. I would go around the tents and show it off,” she says. “When there was a wedding, I’d sneak into the tent to watch the colourful gowns the ladies were wearing. Fashion’s always helped me out of bad situations I’ve been in.”
Her family gained asylum in Norway when she was eight, where her passion for clothes continued. But she knew her chances of working in the fashion industry were almost nil.
“I come from a refugee background, so my family pushed me to have an academic career that would lead to a stable job. Then, on top of that, I’m a woman, I’m black, I’m wearing the hijab and my last name is Mohamed. So, a job in fashion? Forget it,” she says.
Certainly, until very recently, fashion has had a poor record for diversity. Magazines, in particular, were renowned for a particular type of editor: white, middle-aged and with a cultivated chilly aura – think US Vogue’s Anna Wintour’s sunglasses or German Vogue’s Christiane Arp with her platinum bun – that fed into a narrative of them being untouchable, the ultimate arbiters of taste.
But the past few years have seen many changes. UK Vogue’s Alexandra Shulman was replaced by a younger, black, gay man, Edward Enninful, while in the US, Samira Nasr became the first black editor of Harper’s Bazaar. Several other key posts (increasingly of digital titles) have been taken by young people from ethnic minorities, and the ethos now being pushed is nonhierarchical and all about approachability.
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So now, Mohamed, 29, who until recently was working as a behavioural analyst with people with conditions such as autism, has the job of her dreams as editor of the new Vogue Scandinavia, launching this month, making her the first hijab-wearing person of colour at a western fashion magazine.
Before her appointment was announced, Mohamed had already made headlines, after the French government revealed in April it was considering banning the hijab for women under 18. Mohamed’s response was an Instagram selfie with “Hands off my hijab” written on her upheld palm. It went viral. “The hijab ban is hateful rhetoric coming from the highest level of government,” she wrote.
Mohamed posted because she was exasperated by the justification that the hijab demeans women. Her argument is that it can be a symbol of expression not oppression. “No one’s ever asked if I want to wear the hijab; they always assume that I’m forced to do it. So many other people were speaking for me, but I’ve been silenced for so many years. You feel like you’re screaming at deaf ears,” she says. “No one’s listening.
“I’ve always been expected to be submissive to oppression, whether it was coming from my community, where there are all these rules of how Muslim women are supposed to be, or from the public. When you’re brought up in that environment, you just really get fed up. But now, with social media, I can speak to those who are willing to listen.”
Many assumed it was this stance that brought Mohamed to the attention of Vogue Scandinavia, but in fact, she’s been in the job since October. Her outspokenness (and charm) no doubt made her an attractive hire, but she was chosen primarily for her styling talents, which she’d been displaying for around five years on Instagram, where she has 141,000 followers, enchanted by her imaginative use of vintage or high street items, crazy patterns, cool sunglasses and hijabs.
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At 2019 Paris Fashion Week, she wore a medieval chainmail headdress over her hijab. Young Muslim women (she also has a strong following in devout US Christian communities) loved how she expressed an individuality, while staying true to her faith’s demands for modesty.
“There’s this notion that when you come to the mosque, you shouldn’t obsess about how you look,” she says. “But I believe God loves beauty. If I want to wear a colourful skirt then I should be able to do so. Why should I wear just black just because everyone else does?”
Mohamed’s talking to me from her home outside Oslo. She’s wearing a white shirt and a black hijab. Friendly and frank, it’s immediately obvious she fits none of the boxes in which some would like to place her. Extremely devout, she’s also liberal – a single mother (“Unfortunately, there’s still a stigma about that in the Somali community”) who is vocal about supporting, for example, trans Muslims. “My community does not accept them and it’s so disheartening. We should be a safe space for everyone because we know what it’s like to be excluded.”
One of 11 siblings (two adopted), Mohamed and her family were forced to flee the Somali civil war. She spent her early years in a camp in Kenya, living in a one-room tent with an outside toilet and cooking over an open fire.
“It was the only world I knew. My parents used to tell me how life was when there was peace: my father would go to work – he had an office job – my aunts would go to university. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to be free.”
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Still, she was happy. “It’s funny, the things that are traumatising to the adults but which I have fond memories of. When I share them with my mother, I can see in her face that she feels very differently about them to me. We’d have to stand for six hours in queues for food and sometimes you would still come home empty-handed, but I would fight with my siblings to stand in those queues. When we did get something the cans had no logos, so you never knew what you had. I found this really exciting. I’d hang over my father, saying, ‘What is it? Did I get something good like beans? Or did I get nasty tomato paste?’ ”
When she was eight, her family moved to Norway. “My parents told me, ‘We’re going to go to a place where we don’t have to worry about food and you can go to proper school.’ ”
Encountering the outside world for the first time, Mohamed was most excited by the variety of outfits she saw. “I remember at the airport my mum telling me to hurry up because I kept stopping. I was so mesmerised by everything. I wanted to look at these weird-looking people and what they were wearing. And escalators – I didn’t trust them!”
On arrival, they were placed in an asylum camp in a town of only 2,000 people, many of whom resented refugees. At school, many children had never seen a black person before. “When I washed my hands, everyone gathered to see if my colour was coming off.
“I had this little dream that everything in Norway was going to be perfect and then it really wasn’t,” Mohamed continues. “In the refugee camp the thing that was scary was the men with guns, but you learnt how to manoeuvre around these dangerous people. When they came into your house you just prayed they wouldn’t take your mum or dad. You didn’t look at them; you tried to be invisible. But in Norway the people that were harming us were our neighbours, and it was much more scary because they were not in uniform, so you didn’t know what to look out for. I didn’t understand why Mum was forcing us to stay in the place where we felt so lonely.”
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Suffering from post-traumatic stress, she developed “huge anxieties” and insomnia that led to her being prescribed sleeping pills. Desperate to return to Africa, she frequently tried to run away. Immigration officials questioned her, away from her family, to ascertain if their story was genuine. “I’d say, ‘Why do you worry about the things that happened to me in my own country when you can’t even help me with what’s happening to me today? I’m still scared.’ ”
Mohamed wore the hijab every now and then, as she pleased. But now she decided to wear it daily to school, as a riposte to authority figures telling her how oppressive it was. “It was the first time I’d heard this, [that] it was a cultural indoctrination. The teachers were asking if my mother had forced me to do it, saying, ‘In Norway, women are free. You can wear whatever you want.’ It felt like everyone was telling me how bad I had it in life. I wasn’t allowed to be proud of where I came from or even tell happy stories about it, and I thought my hijab looked good.”
But at school, the garment sparked “constant bullying. At first it was verbal abuse, then it got violent – they would take the hijab off in class. A teacher confiscated the hijab because he said it was disturbing the class, so I started bringing a spare.”
A meeting was called between Mohamed’s mother and six teachers, where it was agreed she could wear the hijab on the school bus but not in lessons. “So the next day I just didn’t go to school.” Her mother begged her to abandon the hijab for a quiet life. “It was one of the first big arguments I ever had with her. I said, ‘I can take it if the outside world doesn’t like me, but I need you to like me.’ So then she was on my side and told the school, ‘You just have to accept however she wants to come.’ ”
The situation grew worse. “There were posters in the local coffee shop saying refugees are not allowed and they drew me with, like, a monkey holding a banana.” Things finally eased after the family was allowed to leave the camp and live with Mohamed’s grandmother, who was already settled in Oslo. With time, she says, the hijab “just became part of my identity. It was who I was.”
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As a teenager, Mohamed’s fascination with clothes grew and when she was 16 she sent her CV to all the boutiques in the local mall. “But as soon as they saw me, the manager said she couldn’t hire a Somali girl, because that would scare the customers. So I stopped being interested in fashion.”
Mohamed decided to work in mental health. At 23, she gave birth to her daughter, but split up with the Norwegian father a few months later. (Her child, she says, will be under no obligation to wear a hijab.)
At home in the evenings with her baby, Mohamed started posting on Instagram her “eastern-western” outfits. As her following grew, she began to be asked to collaborate with brands and attend events. In 2019, she was signed by a model agency, with her healthcare employer granting her a flexible contract so she could combine the two careers.
Since then she’s modelled for the likes of MaxMara and Cartier, yet the transition wasn’t seamless. When she first attended Paris Fashion Week in 2019, Mohamed was upset by the big deal that security guards made of scrutinising her invitations to shows. “They didn’t believe someone in a hijab could have access to these events. Often, I’d have to call someone already inside to let me in.”
She’s been treated with contempt by PRs and casting directors. Some of the worst labels are those with a huge Arab and African client base (the Muslim fashion market is set to be worth £260 billion by 2023). “It’s so bizarre.”
The industry’s snootiness compared very unfavourably with her healthcare background. “It will for ever be shocking to me, the things these [fashion] people get away with.”
When Vogue Scandinavia approached Mohamed, she was interviewed by execs from New York-based publisher Condé Nast and the Swedish company Four North, which had licensed the title. “There’s a lot of tokenism in fashion – you’re hired because you tick, say, the Asian box. But one of the things that made me comfortable in this interview process was they knew how I styled and what fashion meant to me and the things that I tried to express through my clothing. It wasn’t just like, ‘Oh yay, she’s hijabi and black!’ It was one of the first times I felt I wasn’t there just for decoration, but for what I had to say.”
Generally, she’s wary that people will now treat her with too much reverence. “I don’t like it when people have too much power. I’m supposed to break the barriers of what a person in a high position should act like. Career-wise, it’s huge that I’m a fashion editor, but when I go on a shoot now it changes the whole dynamic. So if people don’t know I’m an editor, I like to keep it that way. Fashion is such an elitist industry and when you have this position everyone starts behaving differently. If I make a mistake, people are not going to correct me, because everyone is so scared.”
It seems a bold move to be launching a new Vogue, even one that will only appear in print six times a year, when magazine-land is in terminal crisis – with legends such as Vogue Paris, Vogue España, Vogue Italia and German Vogue all now being run from a central London hub. But this Vogue is editorially independent from Condé Nast, and there’s no question that Scandi style has long been crying out for a showcase. “But what most people have seen so far is just one aspect of our style,” Mohamed says. “I’m hoping people will see all those stories coming out about our many cultures and not just the version of Scandinavia that French men like.”
What do French men like? “They believe good fashion comes from the Italians or French and what they like from us is very minimalist. But Scandinavians have all these other patterns – we can be extremely colourful.”
Even today, Mohamed says, “The industry gatekeepers still don’t like me, because I talk too much. I haven’t learnt to sugarcoat things. It’s fine; we get by.” If she has wobbles, she remembers the autistic patients she still works with voluntarily in her spare time. “People are always trying to force them to fit into our society, but they are so honest and authentic. In fashion you can’t even say you love something because you’re so afraid of being judged. We have a long way to go.”
Mohamed smiles. “But I was silenced when I was eight years old. It’s not going to happen again.”
Styling credits
Stylist Alice Wang. Make-up Hina Suleman. Production Amar Faiz/Id.studio. Post-production Kiffa. Rawdah Mohamed wears black floral jacket and trousers, Gucci; blue print blouse and trousers, Zimmermann
