“I do not want to be used as false advertising”: Ceval on embodying her truth

Moments into sitting down for cocktails and snacks with Ceval, she is reciting a poem by Maya Angelou, by heart. “The sun has come. The mist has gone. We see in the distance our long way home. I was always yours to have. You were always mine. We have loved each other in and out of time,” she says.

A few breaths later she’s musing about “how many fashion people hate fashion” as we collapse in laughter on the couches at Copenhagen’s freshly opened Soho House. She orders us a round of tequila shots. This is Ceval. She oscillates effortlessly between your best friend and your wise big sister. In the four years since the Somali-Norwegian trans, black, curve model broke into the modelling industry – two and a half of which were pandemic years, mind you – she’s achieved a handful of ‘firsts’. First trans model to be the face of YSL beauty, first black trans curve model in British Vogue. She’s posed alongside Kate Moss and nude on billboards worldwide for Dolce & Gabbana. To call her an icon would be entirely accurate.

Related: Girl on fire: Norwegian model Ceval Omar is fashion's hottest property

But back to the poem. Ceval discovered it as an adolescent, growing up in Oslo, and to this day it’s her favourite. “When I read it to myself, going through a hard time, it was almost like meeting myself, talking to myself,” she says. “It was the scared version of me talking to the version of me that I wanted to come true.”

It seems that long-dreamt about iteration of Ceval – the true Ceval – is sitting across from me on the Soho House patio. She looks like a modern Renaissance painting in a figure-hugging vintage Jean Paul Gaultier top, barely-there skirt and sky-high Saint Laurent platforms, also vintage. A Balenciaga City bag sits on the couch beside her. In the coming days she’ll walk the Holzweiler and Rotate runways for Copenhagen Fashion Week. She radiates so much star quality that more than one waiter goes out of their way to ask who she is.

Growing up, Ceval, now 27, didn’t dream of modelling so much as she dreamed, tentatively, of her “own womanhood”. “I would dream myself into these women and use them as a reference in my journey,” she says. “I would dream myself into their lives, as if I was them. It was almost like crushes, until I was brave enough to be myself.” Fittingly, one such “crush” was Naomi Campbell.

Whispers of her truth would come through, even as she manoeuvred to hide who she was from those around her. When Ceval was seven, she wanted to take dance classes, but her mother wanted her to “do football and stuff ”. “So I lied to her and said dance helps with my football,” she says, laughing. Still, she took a fairly traditional route, studying media and communication in Oslo. She thought that perhaps she would work behind the camera – a photographer, a producer, maybe a journalist.

Ceval’s first brushes with high fashion came as a teenager. Restless and frustrated with life in Oslo, she would occasionally run away, staying with a cousin in London. There, she could begin to express herself. “I would stay with her and I would get all dressed up and everything. I had such creative ideas,” she says. “When you’re that young and you know that ‘this is my path’, the people around you start to believe it, too.” One of the first photos of her with her “jewellery and hair”, back when she was “literally a baby” (she was 18), was taken by a street style photographer.

She recalls getting all done up and going to hang around outside the Vivienne Westwood show at Somerset House during London Fashion Week. “I was outside smoking with my friends and the PR lady goes, ‘The show is about to start, come now!’” Apparently Ceval looked so fabulous, so much like she belonged, that she didn’t even have to sneak in. “I brought my two friends with me and we sat second row.”

Related: How trans models are shaping the future of fashion

Another time she snuck into the J.W. Andersen show and sat front row next to Anna Wintour. “I went backstage and I met her,” she says, nonchalantly. “Wait, you just went backstage and met Anna Wintour?” I ask. “What did you say to her?!” “Hi,” says Ceval, giggling. When it came to modelling, everything happened all at once. The agency Heartbreak in Oslo had become aware of Ceval through images on social media, but hadn’t actually signed her yet. In 2018, Maison Margiela was specifically looking for trans models to launch its new fragrance, Mutiny. When renowned casting director Jess Hallett came calling, Heartbreak showed her some Facebook pictures of Ceval (“My agent told me never to tell anyone this,” Ceval admits).

“She liked me out of a lot of girls. I waited two weeks, and I didn’t book the job,” Ceval says. “But two weeks later I get a call when I’m hungover at 2 pm in the afternoon saying to rush over to the agency.” Ceval takes her first polaroids and a week after that, agencies worldwide are calling. Before she had even booked anything major, there was a profile on her on Refinery29. Then she was in New York, signing her contract at Muse. Next came Present in London, Women360 in Paris, Mega in Germany and Uno Models in Barcelona. It was a wild time. “Me and my friends were at a party with Lindsay Lohan,” she says.

A couple of weeks before we shoot Ceval’s first Vogue cover, she calls me up over FaceTime. She’s sitting in the bathtub in her new Paris apartment, her face framed by bubbles. Sunglasses on, cigarette in hand. She means business. She wants the cover to be major – historic. Moments after we hang up, she emails our entire team suggesting that all of her friends, her sisters, appear on the cover alongside her. She even sends a reference image: the Peter Linbergh Vogue cover featuring the legendary 1990s supermodels. Once we agree to her vision – we’d be crazy not to – Ceval gets to work, sending texts and making calls, booking Airbnbs for the out-of-towners.

This is how we came to have nine extraordinary faces – all within the LGBTQIA+ community – on our cover. In addition to Ceval, there are two Norwegians: Inti Wang, the non-conforming Balenciaga muse, and Jacqueline Landvik, the trans photographer who has shot Ceval for this very magazine. There’s one Dane: model Chili Dia. There’s rising trans models Gia Bab, Maxim Magnus and Micky Francis Hes. There's model-slash-actress Raya Martigny and model-slash-musician Dustin Muchuvitz.

Related: Diversity in Scandinavia: 6 industry figures reflect on the current state of play

At Soho House, I ask Ceval why she would choose (speaking of Lindsay Lohan) to pull a Mean Girls and break her crown into tiny pieces, sharing it amongst her friends. After all, a solo cover would probably be better for her career. “It could have been a celebration about me,” she says. “But I wanted it to be a celebration of all the versions of me that make spaces for me in this world, just as I make spaces for them in this world.” She pauses and adds: “They also are deserving of celebration and a light in the sun.”

Inti Wang describes our cover best as “dolls united”. The Norwegian model first caught sight of Ceval when they were “16 and sneaking in the club”. “When I get to the top floor where the music is popping, I see her performing in six-inch platforms and another 20 inches on the hair,” recalls the model. “She was clearly the spotlight and the energy was, in the best way, contagious.” According to Inti, the mood on set of the shoot was “soul-warming”.

Ceval tells me that Inti, along with each and every model on our cover, has “shown a sisterhood” to her, something she had “walked this path searching for”. “They’ve shown me sisterhood in their kindness, their intelligence... Most of them don’t know each other, but they’re all my leaves, of my tree.” The sisterhood immediately permeated throughout the group, so much so that when Ceval was off shooting her solo images, she was jealous of all the fun the other models were having without her.

Two Norwegian trans women navigating the fashion industry, Jacqueline and Ceval share a singular bond. In fact, it was Jacqueline’s photos of the model that first caught the eye of agencies and casting directors. The duo met outside an art exhibition in Oslo in 2016 and have been “together ever since”. Ceval isn’t exaggerating – you rarely find one without the other. Two days later I’ll hear my name shouted, loud, over the dull buzz of a crowd at a fashion event and I’ll turn to find them side by side, leaning against a wall, looking cool and smiling. Whenever Ceval books a big job, Jacqueline is her first call because “she gets more excited than me”.

“You know when the gays say, ‘She is the moment’? Well, Ceval quite literally is,” says Jacqueline, noting that “navigating the intersection of multiple oppressions at once is very challenging as a model in fashion”. Ceval has been a common subject for the photographer, who dropped out of high school at 16 to enrol in art photography school, since the duo first met. “Oh my god I’ve shot Ceval so many times,” Jacqueline says. “Almost all of the pics on Ceval’s Instagram I have taken.”

Jacqueline stresses that “we are very free, lucky and privileged in Oslo”, however, she also “never felt part of a community” growing up. That is, until she met Ceval. “Finding Ceval and having a sister by my side in my own journey has been life-changing and life-defining in all types of ways,” she says, also naming Inti in her Norwegian found-family (“I kinda imagined us as the Power puff Girls, always on a mission and always backed up under any circumstance,” adds Inti).

Ceval and Jacqueline’s careers have soared in tandem, by design. When the latter was invited to participate in Vogue’s 2020 “Hope” issue, Ceval was an obvious choice as her subject. In turn, Ceval insisted Jacqueline be included in this Vogue cover shoot in our very first conversation. While Jacqueline wasn’t exactly surprised to get the call from her closest sister and collaborator to appear on the cover of Vogue Scandinavia, Dutch-Surinamese model Gia Bab, who met Ceval at a fashion week event at Palais de Tokyo just last year, could hardly wrap her head around the offer.

“I was in Ibiza when I received a message from Ceval with the question to join,” says Gia. “At the time I didn’t really understand what the project was about but thought we were all going to celebrate her being on the cover.” For Gia, simply hearing that another BIPOC trans model would be appearing on our cover was thrilling. When it became clear that she was to be on the cover as well? “At first I laughed big time as I thought it was a misunderstanding,” she says. “But then, luckily, reality set in.”

Just as she has found her sisterhood in this group of models, Ceval has found a new home in Paris. A little over a year ago, the model spent a month and a half in the French capital, after which she called Jacqueline and cried. “I was like, ‘I don’t feel so distinctively different here. I’m not seen as so alien’,” she says. “I love Norway and it’s where I’ve grown up and been my whole life, but it’s so evident how I’m seen. I feel the energy of how I’m seen and how different I am. And it’s every waking day of your life. It’s not very comfortable or inspiring when, every room you go into, you’re immediately acknowledged for how hyper different you are from every one else.” Jacqueline has made the move as well, of course; the duo live together.

Related: “Changing rooms make me anxious”: How can shopping be more trans-inclusive?

Though Ceval’s star has risen – and continues to rise – at an unprecedented rate, it seems the industry itself has struggled to keep up. She often arrives at photoshoots to find that clothes don’t fit, despite her sizes being communicated to stylists and designers in advance. “I have to be honest and say that for this shoot, for the cover shoot, I had a breakdown,” she says. Garments had to be cut open, fabric had to be added (it wasn’t the cover look, which is custom Mugler). “I felt so horrible about myself. And I was like, ‘Why am I made to feel bad about my body when it’s not my body that is bad, but the design?”

Ceval’s own self-esteem is not the only thing at risk when clothes have to be altered to fit her. “I do not want to be used as a false advertisement,” she says. “I don’t want to have people see me wear a garment and think they can wear it and then go to the store and try to buy it and it’s not in that size.” She describes a common issue in an industry that is keen to showcase different body types without actually catering to those body types at the retail level. She sums up her point with a quote that deserves its own T-shirt: “I can never be the face of something dishonest when I’m living in my truth.”

Despite that potent statement, Ceval doesn’t jump to label herself an activist. “I’m actively living my life,” she says, simply. “And that actively in forms, inspires and educates. Just by me existing.” It’s a sentiment echoed by her sisters. “Ceval is a pioneer for the trans community, breaking so many barriers simply by being herself as a model of colour,” says Gia. “I’m so proud of her and at this stage in my career I feel honoured to stand with her in this industry to push for real change, all in the name of representation and equal opportunity. We both know that it will not always be easy on the frontline, as much will be expected, but with her opening doors for us all, there’s a lot to look forward to.”

Ceval recently shot a campaign that will catapult her to “supermodel” status, allowing her the opportunity to reach an even wider audience. It is an unprecedented moment, but those who know her best are not in the least surprised. “I always saw her as the star and icon she is,” says Jacqueline. “The rest of the world finally caught up.” A group of tall, well-dressed people – models, presumably – enter the patio area at Soho House. “Oh my god, are you Ceval?!” one girl exclaims. They air kiss and suggest we all join forces at a larger table. More drinks are ordered as Ceval holds court, telling outrageous tales, eliciting plenty of laughter. It seems she finds sisters wherever she goes, expanding her orbit. Adding more leaves to her tree.