This season, British designer Ashley Williams wanted to do something different, reports Dazed magazine. So she swapped her usual cheery brights for a darker aesthetic (including black lips and shirts emblazoned with the words “bad mood”) and looked beyond the typical roster of It-Girl models like Georgia May Jagger to join her crew. For spring 2016, Williams found a runway star in social media darling, tattoo artist, and self-described alien Grace Neutral.
Neutral stands out in a sea of cookie-cutter models for more than her ink. According to Dazed, she has also undergone body-modification surgery to fork her tongue, make her ears pointed, remove her belly button, and carve moon shapes into her cheeks. Oh, and did we mention the whites of her eyes are actually a deep blue-violet? (Also a tattoo.) The newly minted model works in a tattoo shop in East London and has gained fans across the world thanks to Instagram (she has about 222K followers to date), where she posts pics of the tattoos she inks by hand and offers a glimpse into her day-to-day life. It's definitely a feed you can get lost in. "I just want to change my outside to reflect my soul, so [I] feel like I fit more comfortably in my own skin," Neutral told i-D magazine last year. "Life is one big dress-up box, so why wouldn't you want to explore?" We always applaud seeing all types of beauty represented on the runway — so well done, Ashley Williams!
Neutral stands out in a sea of cookie-cutter models for more than her ink. According to Dazed, she has also undergone body-modification surgery to fork her tongue, make her ears pointed, remove her belly button, and carve moon shapes into her cheeks. Oh, and did we mention the whites of her eyes are actually a deep blue-violet? (Also a tattoo.) The newly minted model works in a tattoo shop in East London and has gained fans across the world thanks to Instagram (she has about 222K followers to date), where she posts pics of the tattoos she inks by hand and offers a glimpse into her day-to-day life. It's definitely a feed you can get lost in. "I just want to change my outside to reflect my soul, so [I] feel like I fit more comfortably in my own skin," Neutral told i-D magazine last year. "Life is one big dress-up box, so why wouldn't you want to explore?" We always applaud seeing all types of beauty represented on the runway — so well done, Ashley Williams!