In this FRONTPAGE story from Neu York, the Miuccia Prada and Maximilian Davis-approved model opens up about what it's really like to be young in fashion. Also mentioned: funnel cakes, Coney Island, shitty agents, and best friends. da.
When Jordan Daniels booked her first big show — Prada Spring/Summer 2019 — at the age of 19, she tried not to get her hopes up. Every model knows that no gig is a guarantee until they’re walking down the runway. She was excited, she says, “but not too excited.”
Her fitting went about as well as it possibly could. “They had an outfit for me, I tried it on, and walked. Then they decided to change my shoes,” she says. That’s when Miuccia Prada approached. “I was so nervous.” But Ms. Prada greeted her and, looking down, said, “‘Oh, she has really nice feet. Put her in the sandal.’”
“I was like, ‘Oh my God,’” says Daniels. “‘Ms. Prada just said I have nice feet.’”
The entire fitting took about 30 minutes. “I was freaked out that it was so quick,” Daniels says. Turns out, it was a good sign. “After walking Prada, I went to Paris and walked pretty much every runway,” she says. “From there, my career kick-started. Everything has been an upward spiral since.”
Last September, Daniels walked major shows such as Maximilian Davis’ Ferragamo debut in Milan, and she has landed editorials in Allure, Interview, Love, and British Vogue. This season, the now-24-year-old Daniels is poised to be a star.
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Born in Cape Town, South Africa, and raised in Auckland, New Zealand (her parents immigrated when she was 11 months old), she has the look of a high-fashion model: 5’11” with long, healthy-looking beach waves, magnetic brown eyes, and a winning pout. But she’s also got the easygoing, friendly nature of someone who grew up with a steady stream of sunshine — and who didn’t always fit in. “I was always gawky and out of place,” she says of her teenage self. “I was taller than every single person in my school. People would come up to me and say, ‘You should be a model.’”
It’s true that modeling is in her DNA: Daniels’ mother modeled as a teenager growing up in South Africa. But she was reluctant to let her daughter go down the same path — she regretted not focusing on her studies.
“When I was around 16,” says Daniels, “I was at my little cousin’s birthday party, at a rollerblading derby, and one of the moms gave me the business card for a random agency in New Zealand and was like, ‘You could do it.’ I went home and begged my mom. ‘I want to be a model.’ And she was like, ‘You don’t even know what that is. You don’t know what will happen.’”
In the end, Daniels won, and her mom spoke to an agency.
It wasn’t the glitz and glamour that attracted Daniels to the industry. It was the freedom it promised. “Coming from a working-class family, high fashion wasn’t something that was accessible to me. It wasn’t something I had the privilege to care about or use to express myself, but rather to escape my own reality.” And not to imply that she didn’t like the life she had, she clarifies. What fashion offered was the chance to be somebody else entirely.
At 17, she was booking jobs abroad, traveling back and forth between Australia and New Zealand. And all while studying to be a social worker and juggling three jobs: as a cashier at a supermarket, a server at a restaurant, and a sales associate at a retail clothing store. Eventually, her agent suggested she take a year off to travel and try modeling full-time. Without telling her parents, Daniels decided to drop everything and give it a go. When her dad found out, he wasn’t happy. “‘You can’t drop out of school!” Daniels recalls him saying. “‘You’re not allowed to.’ And I was like, ‘Well, I just did. It’s already done.’”
Soon, an agency in Los Angeles had reached out, set her up with a new agent, and helped Daniels relocate. In LA, she began booking e-commerce gigs and other “random jobs.” But she wasn’t happy with her new agent. “He pressured me to lose weight,” she says. “He would tell me that I could do shows and then tell me that I couldn’t — he was super manipulative and not nice.”
In general, Daniels found the industry to be toxic. “There weren’t a lot of Black and light-skinned models walking the runways. There wasn’t body positivity like there is now,” she says. “The girls were just prepubescent — super skinny — and that was the only standard.”
Thankfully, The Society, her current agency, swooped in and took her under its wing, getting her relocated again, this time to New York. For the Spring/Summer 2019 season, when she was 19, she booked her first major European exclusive: Prada.
Daniels’ mom, now fully supportive of her decision to model, told “everybody she knows” the story about Ms. Prada complimenting her daughter’s feet.
The only thing perhaps more gratifying about that experience for Daniels was running into her former agent at the show. “I actually saw my agent from LA outside. He was there with another girl,” she says. “It was one of those moments that felt like fate.” She says he approached and asked if she was doing the show. “‘Well, what else would I be here for?’” she responded. “And he apologized. It was so crazy. I just fully proved him wrong. It was great.”
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With roughly a decade of experience under her belt, Daniels feels more confident now on set. “I started to establish more of a voice,” she says. “People ask me, ‘What do you like? What looks good on you? Are you comfortable? What products should I use in your hair?’” When she was younger, she says, this didn’t happen. “No one’s including you in that process. The level of respect and creative collaboration has come a long way. I love my job now for that reason.”
Tyrell Hampton, the photographer who shot Daniels for this story, is one of her regular collaborators and closest friends. They met when Daniels arrived on the East Coast, in 2018, and have been “pretty much inseparable since.” During the pandemic, when jobs were scarce, they took care of each other, went to protests together, and did photoshoots on their own to pass the time.
“Because we’re so close, we speak each other’s language,” says Daniels. “He takes pictures of me at parties and events. We’ve shot editorials together. We know how the other works and what the other likes. It’s funny, sometimes we scare people on set because we fight like brother and sister. He’s like, ‘Do this,’ and I’m like, ‘It’s not going to look good; I don’t want to do that.’ And then he’s like, ‘No, no, no. Fucking do it.’ It’s good to have that frustrated collaborative energy because we get to what we want.”
Coney Island, where this spread was shot, holds particular significance for the pair. “Four or five years ago we went there on the train,” says Daniels, “and Ty was being a nut job. He was taking videos of himself doing crazy things, like screaming at the camera. He got in the water, which was probably radioactive, and it was the cloudiest day ever. I posted the videos to Instagram — this was before TikTok — and they went weirdly viral.” Before they got back on the train home, they got themselves funnel cakes covered in powdered sugar as a snack.
Even though so much time has passed, the energy on set this summer had a similar intimacy and innocence. “We have fun together no matter what we’re doing,” Daniels says.
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Looking ahead at her career, Daniels doesn’t have a plan. And that’s intentional. “When I was younger, I used to have brands, magazines, etcetera, as goals I wanted to reach,” she says. “But once I reached them, I was like, ‘Now what?’ I feel like it’s better to have a direction that I want my life to go in rather than specific people I want to work with. Life leads you down a crazy path, anyway. If it comes, it comes. And that’s it.”
