I have only just met Alex Consani when the 22-year-old model challenges me to guess her sign.
By virtue of the question—confident, unabashed—it should be a dead giveaway that she’s a Leo, the center of attention. Indeed, Consani has been everywhere this year: on my feeds and the Paris runways, in campaigns for McQueen and Tory Burch. But then something about the otherworldly wide set of her blue eyes makes me wonder if she’s an Aquarius—quirky, free-spirited, unfailingly herself. She offers to convey her sign by spinning around and turning her head over her shoulder, and she’s so self-assured and serene, parting her lips just so, that I settle (wrongly) on Virgo. “First day of Leo. July 23,” she says. “I was born, get this, at 4:20 a.m. Not kidding. It’s on my birth certificate. I was made to be crazy.”
We are standing in the shade of a colossal soundstage at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles. Hours later, Consani will walk the Vogue World: Hollywood runway in a Valentino couture interpretation of costume designer Sandy Powell’s work for the 1992 film Orlando—an off-white ruffled blouse worn under a leather-studded harness with teal and white balloon shorts, a cape outfitted with a sculptural Elizabethan collar, and a jaunty chapeau for good measure. Like the best models, Consani is endlessly malleable: She can inhabit an elaborate couture costume homage just as easily as, weeks before in Paris, she’d slipped into a wispy, backless dress for Schiaparelli and throwback punk bumsters at McQueen.
But Consani isn’t interested in simply being a canvas for fashion houses to project onto. She’s cultivating her own style: a blend of effervescent youthfulness and refinement, an eclecticism that signals this highly visible young woman is still getting to know herself. “I think that what’s so tragic about fashion now is that people feel like everything needs to be connected to another piece of clothing that they’re wearing,” she says. “The coolest people that I knew growing up were like, I want to wear this shirt. I want to wear these pants. Nothing matched. It all looked fucking ugly. But they felt beautiful.” Today she’s dressed in a suede bomber jacket, a two-tier pink and white polka-dot minidress she bought at the Paris vintage store Nuovo, and distressed chalk white pointy-toe Prada heels with inverted seams, which she appears to have worn into the ground.
Consani’s outfit will carry her all the way to the Vogue World Chateau Marmont after-party—and likely beyond, given that she deems the fête’s 11 p.m. wind down “really early.” It’s been a whirlwind month: not just Schiaparelli and McQueen in Paris but Alaïa and Givenchy too, and Versace at the end of September in Milan. Today her parents are here—Lisa and Anthony, whom she’s flown down from her hometown of Petaluma in the Bay Area, and she’s taken it upon herself to style them for the occasion: a pink floral Prada dress for Lisa, a JW Anderson trench coat for Anthony. Though—with Consani’s approval—Lisa makes the case to swap the trench last-minute for Conner Ives’s “Protect the Dolls” T-shirt, a viral, trans-rights rallying cry, which quickly picks up steam online.
As her parents tell it, Consani has always had an inexhaustible drive. “She’s been that way all her life,” says Lisa. “Never one to accept the word no.” TikTok provided her with an audience long before modeling did. Consani broke out there as a homebound high schooler during lockdown, across her two accounts, @captincroook and @ms.mawma, where she has now amassed 8.5 million combined followers. Her posts have a risk-taking, antic quality, bordering on performance art. She’ll badly serenade strangers or dance on a crowded subway platform. “I’d obviously seen her on TikTok,” her friend and fellow model Paloma Elsesser says. “Then when I met her I was deeply refreshed by her wisdom and sensitivity. Pretty quickly I was like, Oh, this girl feels different than I imagined.” Dara Allen, a stylist and longtime friend, agrees: “She has so many different layers to her and I think that’s what makes her exciting.”
Consani’s TikTok accounts trace the highs and lows of her modeling career. In June 2021, she published a video that her dad sent her to cheer her up after she wasn’t cast in a Marc Jacobs show. Less than three months later, she posted a fan edit of her runway debut for Tom Ford’s spring 2022 collection. Consani was once advised to delete her TikTok and cultivate a more mysterious persona for the sake of her career. “I’m so happy I didn’t,” she says. Increasingly other models are following suit, rejecting the profession’s seen-and-not-heard ethos and making personality as much of a selling point as their look. “It’s fab,” she says. “We should have our own power.”
Growing up in the Bay Area, Consani took style cues from skater chicks in their Thrasher tees and adopted a love of the scene’s rappers (still on heavy rotation, despite a move to New York). “You see a bitch in a vintage Saint Laurent trench coat buttoned to the top and don’t expect her to be rapping Mike Sherm, but it is the vibe,” she says.
Clothing served as an early way of expressing her identity. “My first memory is this pink princess dress that I had,” Consani recalls. “That was an introduction to me representing myself correctly.” One of her mother’s favorite photos shows Consani, age three, wearing a gray T-shirt over a pink skirt with a sheer purple overlay, a tiara embellished with pink feathers, pink Sleeping Beauty heels, and a pair of clip-on earrings. She clutches a silver star-tipped wand, a tiny pink purse, and a pink floral umbrella. Another shows Consani, age seven, running around a playground in stilettos. Heels—particularly of the Prada variety—are still a mainstay. “She will pump in a heel all day, every day if she chooses to,” Elsesser says. “Let me put this shoe on and keep it pushing, because Alex is pumping in a size 39 and we both are 41s.”
While her parents were supportive of Consani’s early interest in girls’ clothes, they didn’t necessarily think it was anything more than childhood curiosity. And Consani lacked the vocabulary to express anything more fundamental. “I remember calling myself a boy-girl,” she says. “I was like, I’m both, and I’m neither.” For Lisa, everything clicked on first grade school picture day, when Consani, dressed in a light blue boys’ linen button-down shirt, telegraphed her misery through the camera’s lens. Anthony recalls taking her, sometime afterward, to Kmart, where she picked out a lime green 1960s-style dress. Fashion wasn’t the only place she was experimenting. Around that time Consani was also trying out new names. As Lisa tells it, one day, on a long drive up the California coast, Consani proclaimed that God had given her the name Alex. “God?” Lisa asked. “Yeah,” Consani replied nonchalantly. “She told me my name is Alex.” (Actually, says Anthony, the source was Selena Gomez’s character Alex Russo on the Disney show Wizards of Waverly Place.) When I ask Consani about this later, an impish grin spreads across her face. “My parents were supportive, but there’s still that fear—especially as a kid—to say the name that they gave you wasn’t what you wanted…so I told them it was God,” she says. “I told them in my late teens, Yeah, by the way, it wasn’t God.”
It all came to a head when she was eight. For years Anthony had taken her to a local German festival at Christmastime. “My dad would dress me in traditional lederhosen—in the hat with the feather—and it made me feel insane,” she says. That year Consani pitched a knock-down, drag-out fit. “I think that was where they realized not only my identity, but my personality is affected by my clothing,” she says. “Since then, they’ve always been really open to what I wear.” This would include admittedly questionable outfits during her teen years: “I once got this trench coat out of my mom’s closet and wore Fashion Nova shoes, these tight pants, a purple smoky eye, a top bun, and thick eyebrows.” Another formative moment that Consani jokes she “should have been bullied for” involved the chunky, knee-high Demonia platform stompers (that added another four and a half inches to her six-foot frame) she wore to high school graduation, in 2021. “I just loved being tall,” she says. “I was looking down on my haters.”
At 12, Consani signed to a Los Angeles–based agency for trans models. This gave her a community she never took for granted. “I grew up around a lot of trans people,” she says. “There was so much beauty in that, so much femininity in that, and so much growth in that and support in that.” Support is something she’s kept front of mind. “Coming into fashion, especially being around these girls that are so successful, there’s such pressure to do all the campaigns, and do all the shows, and get all the money,” she says. “That was never my goal. It was always just to be that person that I never got to see when I was looking through a magazine.”
Consani surrounds herself with friends who share a similar sense of purpose. Elsesser says it bonds her and Consani—representing body diversity and the transgender community, respectively. “We have to bring that conversation to everything that we do. Is it draining at times? Yes. Is it a very intense responsibility? Yes. But I think that is what our destiny was, and there has to be faith and trust that being rooted in purpose will always prevail,” Elsesser says. “So—heavy is the crown.” (When I repeat the last part to Consani, she offers a sisterly eye roll. “She loves to say that shit,” she says.)
Consani’s friend Allen, also a trans woman, tells me how rare it is for a model like Alex to lead major national campaigns. “That’s not necessarily something that has happened,” she says. And two trans women collaborating on shoots the way Allen and Consani have would have been inconceivable in an earlier era. “I think that’s what is exciting about making pictures of Alex. These images made you think about something beyond your experience,” she says.
But Consani is intent on separating the success she’s had solely from a story of who she is. “Because I’m a trans person and I’ve said that publicly, everything I’ve done has been connected to my identity, which can be difficult,” she says. “My identity is a part of who I am, but it doesn’t make me who I am.” When she feels she’s booked for a job solely because she’s trans, she will turn it down. “I’m a model first, I’m a woman second, I’m a trans person third. If those ever start to become misconstrued, I’m leaving.”
On a cold day in November, hours before the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund Awards, I meet Consani at a cozy, brick-paved Williamsburg coffee shop. She’s due to announce the fund’s winners that evening, and has picked out a crinkled pewter Gucci dress for the occasion. Consani does not typically work with a stylist for events, and often opts to do her own hair and makeup. In general she’s wary of having other people choose her clothing, and of the obligations all of that brings. She’d much prefer to dress in whatever suits the day’s mood. “I find value in saying what I like and wearing what I like because, ultimately, I’m the one wearing it,” she says. Fashion for her—especially everyday clothing—is an opportunity for self-reflection. “It’s more about how I feel when I wear it,” she says. “I always thought it was only really famous people that had stylists. But everybody in fashion has stylists. I know girls that get styled before they leave the house,” she says. “That stresses me out. I would rather die than have to wear clothes that are strategized for me to wear every single day.”
The coffee shop is overflowing with a work-from-home set, so we relocate to a nearby restaurant. She’s dressed for the cold in a dijon turtleneck and black loafers from The Row, black Saint Laurent jeans, and a vintage herringbone coat.
For someone who once disavowed chic (“because no one knows how to do it”), today’s understated outfit hews pretty close to the word. (“She is always coming up to me and saying, ‘I’m doing chic now,’” Allen will tell me with a laugh.) Consani’s new style reflects a new outlook. In the past she’s put pressure on herself to adhere to hyperfeminine clothing. “If anything, people were like, Girl, put on some jeans,” she says. And while she still loves a little black dress, her current shortcut to feeling confident is a straight-leg Saint Laurent denim. “Of course I enjoy feminine things, feminine clothing specifically. That’s something that gives me a lot of happiness in my personal life,” she says. “But I think that there’s value in taking a step back and thinking, How did these clothes make me feel?”
Speaking of confidence, she’s thinking beyond fashion. She’s dabbled in acting—starring in Demna’s inaugural Gucci collection, La Famiglia, and its accompanying short film, The Tiger, directed by Halina Reijn and Spike Jonze. She shared the screen with Hollywood heavyweights like Demi Moore, Elliot Page, and Edward Norton, not to mention her pal Kendall Jenner. “Kendall and I were dying about it,” Consani says. “We were in the trailer like, Oh my God, we’re literally shooting a movie with Demi Moore.” She’s now set her sights on writing, directing, and producing. “I’ve been writing some stuff for film and TV,” she tells me. She recently signed with 3 Arts Entertainment in Los Angeles, and has already met with a studio. It’s all in the name of self-discovery. “I’ve had a narrative given to me by other creatives,” she says. “I want to be able to write that narrative.”
In this story: hair, Lucas Wilson; makeup, Hannah Murray; manicurist, Yoko Sakakura; tailor, Olga Kim at Carol Ai Studio Tailors.
