When a Toronto teenager was bullied so relentlessly for the white patches on her skin that she had to leave school, no one in that classroom could have guessed she would one day open the Victoria’s Secret runway, front campaigns for Marc Jacobs and Fendi, and build her own multimillion-dollar skincare company. That teenager, known to the world as Winnie Harlow, did not cover her vitiligo to succeed in fashion. She made it the most recognisable thing about her — and, in doing so, helped change who the industry was willing to call beautiful.
From Mississauga to a diagnosis at four
Winnie Harlow was born on 27 July 1994 in Mississauga, Ontario, in the Greater Toronto Area, to parents of Jamaican descent, and has two sisters. At the age of four she was diagnosed with vitiligo, a chronic condition in which the skin loses pigment in patches — not, as it is frequently and wrongly described, albinism. Her childhood was scarred by cruelty: classmates taunted her with names like “cow” and “zebra,” and the bullying grew so severe that she withdrew from school and was home-schooled. She has spoken openly, including in a TEDx talk, about how those years shaped both her pain and her resolve.
Even her name is a small act of self-invention. She has explained that “Winnie” came from a childhood love of Winnie the Pooh, while “Harlow” is a tribute to the 1930s screen icon Jean Harlow — a reinvention that turned a bullied schoolgirl into a character of her own design before the world ever saw her.
Instagram, Tyra Banks and a reality-TV breakthrough
Her break came in 2014, when Tyra Banks discovered her on Instagram and cast her on the twenty-first cycle of America’s Next Top Model. Harlow did not win the competition, but she became a breakout star and fan favourite, and the exposure launched a modelling career almost immediately. That same year she appeared in a Diesel campaign, the first of many — the moment a condition the industry had always hidden became, instead, a selling point.
The work: the first vitiligo supermodel
What followed turned a once-stigmatised condition into a signature. Harlow became a fixture on major runways and in advertising, with credits including Desigual, Marc Jacobs, Tommy Hilfiger, Fendi, Moschino, Nike, Puma and MAC Cosmetics, and in 2018 she became a face of Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty, part of a wider wave of inclusivity in the beauty industry. Her defining runway milestone came on 8 November 2018, when she walked the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show in New York — the first model with vitiligo ever to do so — sharing the runway with Angels including Adriana Lima, in her farewell show, and Candice Swanepoel. She also became a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit model, and in March 2022 she launched her own suncare and skincare brand, Cay Skin, built on a deeply personal need: products formulated to protect every skin tone without the pale residue that conventional sunscreens leave on darker skin.
Redefining who gets to be beautiful
Harlow’s significance reaches well beyond bookings. As the first prominent fashion model with vitiligo, she became a public spokesperson for the condition, reframing it from a flaw to be hidden into a defining feature to be celebrated. Through talks, interviews and her own platform she has become a leading voice for skin-positivity and representation, widely credited — alongside campaigns like Fenty — with pushing the industry toward inclusivity. For a generation of children with visible differences, the sight of her patches on a billboard or a runway has done what no campaign slogan could.
What is striking is how completely she inverted the logic of the industry that had once rejected her. Vitiligo had been, for casting directors, a reason to look away; Harlow made it the reason to look. Brands that had built their identities on a single, uniform notion of flawless skin began booking the model whose skin told a more complicated story, and in doing so they helped normalise difference for millions watching. Her Cay Skin venture extended the same idea into commerce, a line built around the specific needs of skin that the mainstream beauty industry had long overlooked. It is a rare model who turns the thing she was told to hide into both a signature and a business — and rarer still to do it without ever softening the edges of the message.
The Private Side
Harlow’s longtime partner is the NBA forward Kyle Kuzma. The couple began dating in 2020 and went public that June, and in February 2025 Kuzma proposed during a trip to Turks and Caicos. The engagement was widely reported, and the pair have since been planning a wedding, with Harlow expressing a preference for an island setting. She has spoken about the relationship and her plans warmly but selectively, keeping the day-to-day of her private life largely to herself even as her professional one plays out in public.
Earnings and net worth
Celebrity-finance trackers publish an estimate of Harlow’s fortune, but it should be read as an unverified third-party figure rather than a disclosed or audited number. Her income spans modelling contracts — Fendi, Nike, Victoria’s Secret and others — runway and campaign work, screen appearances, and her Cay Skin business, the last of which gives her something most models never acquire: an ownership stake in a brand rather than just a fee for fronting one.
Where she is now
Harlow remains an active high-fashion and editorial model, signed to major agencies in Los Angeles, Milan and London. She continues to run Cay Skin, has expanded into acting, and was celebrated as a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit “Legend” for the franchise’s milestone anniversary. More than a decade after a reality show introduced her to the world, the girl once called “zebra” in a Toronto schoolyard has become one of the most recognisable faces in fashion — recognisable, pointedly, for exactly the thing she was once told to hide.