✒️ In her own words – Nova Orchid pens an interesting and thoughtfully philosophical look at the Nomadic journey and experience of a model through her own lens, for Modellounge.  As a kid living in Sydney, Paris, Amsterdam and Montreal, and traveling erratically through Africa, Asia and North America she’s got something to say that’s worth listening to…

We R Nomads

by Nova Orchid at IMG 

no·mad

ˈnōˌmad/

noun

a member of a people having no permanent abode

a person who does not stay long in the same place; a wanderer.

The official definition of a nomad is a member of a community of people who live in different locations, moving from place to place. Another definition of a nomad is: a model. From Siberia to Cape Town via Tokyo, we form a worldwide network of fashion forward wanderers.

I’ve been a nomad since before I became a member of this upstart community. As a kid living in Sydney, Paris, Amsterdam and Montreal, travelling erratically through Africa, Asia and North America; learning the alphabet in Dutch one minute, joining classes at an Ethiopian Rastafarian school the next; being read naptime stories in a French nursery then chasing kangaroos through the Australian outback, was all “normal”, or so I thought, and without even noticing, I grew an addiction to roaming.

Now that I’m carrying on this way of life of my own volition, as a free, recently official adult citizen, I’m seeing the traveling life as something more than all that seductive schizophrenia. The pathology of constantly moving might be delusion. But the gifts include fantasy, shape shifting adaptability, empathy and a mind so open it’s wild. Yes, we can transform from John Travolta in Grease to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita in front of the lens while standing on a chair in precariously high heels. We can make bikinis look irresistible while posing on an iceberg in Antarctica. During show season, we can stay perky at fittings till 1am only to wake up for a show the next morning at 5am, embodying one runway character after the next all day long, and then hop on a motorbike driven by a speed freaked Frenchman who we’ve never met, our elaborate makeup whiplashing across the inside of the helmet we are wearing, only to arrive (way later than the sensible girl who took the metro) feeling motion sickness and late for embodying yet another persona—then pose with Miss Piggy for the press at the end. This excitement and connection to people, alive and dead, IRL and virtual, known and strange to us, all around the world, sometimes all at once, is what gives us life.

So being a nomad is both selfish and selfless. It can be lonely and it can bring us together. It can make us a role model or a bad model or both, depending on the mood. It is the action feeding our resting sadface, glowface or bitchface, and feeding the perpetual transformation of our careers, our thoughts, our beliefs and ourselves. Our taste for travel or our abilities at it, whether its roots are in restless parents, families who were displaced by war, poverty or natural disaster; or a sedentary life that made us curious to discover the world—make us a hybrid of roving togetherness. I’d even say that with our collective shades and styles, cultures and languages, identities and expressions of beauty, we, the fashion nomads, are creating a diverse democratic future frontier, especially on a good hair day.

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