Not only did Lakshmi Menon make it into the huge May 2009 issue of Vogue, but she booked a whole 12 pages, had the team travel to her homeland of Goa, and landed her first solo editorial in the magazine.
“Everyone around me was pretty thrilled about the whole thing,” says Lakshmi. “But I didn’t realize until a few weeks ago when my agent said to me, ‘Do you know how big this is?’ Your first solo editorial in U.S. Vogue has huge prestige, I believe.”
For Lakshmi, modeling began when she was studying sociology at the University of Bangalore and wanted to earn some side cash. Over the years, she’s refused to move to New York, instead dealing with long flights and hotel rooms in order to maintain her life at home. “As long as I can still live in India and work in the West, I’ll carry on,” she said. “But the day I feel it drains me or wreaks havoc on my life, that’s the day I walk away gracefully.”
Hopefully she’s the beginning of a new trend of Indian faces to look forward to in the modeling industry. “When I first signed with agencies in Europe and the U.S., I barely did anything; it was one show here, another there. At that time it was completely dominated by Caucasian girls, particularly Russians. There were a few black girls, of course, such as Liya Kebede—and someone like Naomi Campbell would do the odd showstopper—but there weren’t many girls of color at all.”
Lakshmi credits Barack Obama’s win and Vogue India’s launch in 2007 to the current rising trend. “You see groups of girls from certain countries who dominate the business for a period of time—the Brazilians, the Russians—it would be great to see something like that for Indian girls,” she enthuses. “And it’s about time, I guess, given the way in which India is opening up as a new market. It would be only fair to have representation.”
