World’s first albino model Connie Chiu on growing up in Kowloon and diversity on the catwalk
A refugee from Hong Kong’s bright sun, Chiu left for Sweden. She recalls the chance inquiry to Jean Paul Gaultier that brought an invitation to model his haute couture collection in Paris, and kick-started her career in fashion
Connie Chiu has fond memories of growing up in one of the hundreds of flats on a housing estate in Kowloon in the 1970s. She lived there until she was seven years old, when she moved to Sweden to escape Hong Kong’s intense sun.
Chiu has albinism and was the world’s first fashion model with the condition. Albinism means she has an absence of pigment in her skin, hair and eyes, causing a pale look and a sensitivity to light.
“I loved standing on our balcony [in Kowloon] in the summer evenings when the popular soap opera [of the time] came on TV,” says Chiu, who will not reveal her age. “I loved the fact that all those families were doing the same thing at exactly the same time.
“I had a vague notion that people lived busy lives, hard lives, but at that moment they belonged to the same community appreciating the same TV show.” Since then, Chiu has lived all around the world, but is currently based in Europe.
Model Thando Hopa helping to defeat prejudice against albinos
Chiu says her parents told her very little about her condition, simply telling her siblings (she has three sisters and one brother) that it was because she had a lack of pigmentation. “That was all,” she says.
