Lupita wows on this gorgeous cover for
Vogue. She also talks about some life experiences that has brought her to this day -
"Her first memory of fashion was at
age five, wearing her “very eighties red cord miniskirt with suspender straps.
Presentation is extremely important in Kenya. You dress formally. You can’t
just wear flip-flops. My mother always had her own style. She wore A-line, tea-length
flowery dresses, very well fitting. Her nails were always perfectly done.” As a
girl in Nairobi, Lupita recalls, “salons were a big feature in my life. We
would go every two weeks to get our hair braided, washed, or treated. That’s
where I read American, British, and a few African magazines.Then I would design
my own clothes. In Kenya it’s much cheaper to get clothes made than to buy
them. We would have everything run up by a tailor, or my aunt Kitty, who is
very creative, would sew things for me.”
It may seem an unlikely combination,
but politics were as ever-present in the Nyong’o household as style. Lupita’s
father, Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o, now a senator, was for a long period an
opposition politician under the repressive Moi regime. He spent three years in
self-imposed exile with his family in Mexico, where Lupita was born.
The Nyong’os returned to Nairobi
when Lupita was one. The following years she remembers as “scary, but I was at
an age where you couldn’t fully understand what was happening.” Her father was
at times detained in jail, once for an entire month, and the family “had to
destroy a lot of his documents. I wasn’t allowed to go to school. We were
basically locked up in the house. The curtains were shut all the time, and we
were just burning papers.” She says the experience made her resilient. “I was
definitely exposed to some extreme situations. Tragedy is something that I have
known and that I have tried to accept as part of life. But I don’t dwell on it.
. . . ” Read the full article here.
