“There’s joy and freedom in leaning into ugliness”: Zinnia Kumar on self-worth and confronting the ‘evil aunty’ in her head

Zinnia Kumar does not believe to hide the discomfort. She prefers to establish visual contact with him, to examine his form and social function before deciding if he deserves space.

“There is great joy and great freedom to look at ugliness,” she says. “Part of me had to decompose female gender roles and restrictive social expectations applied to women according to the dress, presentation and behavior, to look into it. I think that like beauty, colorism and feature, these are all sexual phenomena designed to classify the value of women through beauty, therefore by rejecting it in a certain way, it helped me access a more permitted, unconventional space. ” It is not a declaration intended to provoke, rather an achievement in which it arrived after years of testing (and to fail) to meet an ideal which has never been built for it.

“When an agent said to me:” You are not an obvious beauty, you are an interesting beauty “, I was quite injured,” recalls Kumar. “I thought,” So you think I’m not very pretty? ” »» It has been a time since she aspired to meet the social ideals of beauty. “I was never going to do it. My features were simply not built in this way. ”

Kumar is a lot of things: scientist, environmentalist, writer, model, activist. But his most coherent line line could be the observer of the systems around him and those inside. “When I achieved the power of” interesting “, it really helped to refine my job,” she says. “Instead of feeling aware of not being pretty enough or to fold with a male look, I existed in a space where I could embrace the characters themselves and the art of fashion itself.”

She is inspired by women who overthrow ideals rather than submit to them: Kirsten McMenamy, Julia Nobis, Lady Gaga, Dovima. “They have a way to cross marketing with haute couture, with a dynamism that makes each incredibly unique and art itself. I think that sucking on uniqueness and imperfection in a world of perfection of AI is a kind of beautiful and very human thing. ”

The standards she resists is generational, cultural and very familiar. “In communities, most of us have grown up, we have witnessed family and community members, people in the media criticizing and judging others on their morality, their beauty, their intelligence.