Ameni Esseibi is someone who has spent years challenging the fashion industry to make room for her — and won. She is the first plus-size Arab model, a body positivity advocate, a Jean Paul Gaultier ambassador, a Paris Fashion Week runway veteran, and a woman who has built an entire career on the radical act of showing up exactly as she is.
Born in Tunisia, raised in Dubai, and educated in the French school system, Ameni started her modelling journey at just eighteen years old. But her road to success was anything but easy. She approached agency after agency in Dubai and was told there was no market for her. That the region wasn't ready. But she ignored the naysayers. Dismissing their ignorance and persevered.
Today, she has graced the pages of Vogue, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, and Cosmopolitan. She has walked couture catwalks in Paris. Become a global ambassador for Dubai Fashion Week and the Arab Fashion Council. And along the way has become the voice that an entire generation of Arab women had been waiting for — curvy, confident, and proud of her heritage.
What makes Ameni truly remarkable is not just what she has achieved, but why she set out to achieve it. From the very beginning, becoming a model was never about the pursuit of fame. It was about the young Arab woman who didn't see herself anywhere — not on the runway, not in the magazines, not on the billboards. When Ameni couldn’t find a role model, she decided to become the person she was looking for. The woman others could look to, and understand that they were enough – just as they are.
In our interview, we discuss what representation really means in the modeling space, why the word plus-size should be banned, and how her love of horseback riding has given Ameni a sense of inner peace she didn’t know she was searching for.
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More About Jessica Michault:
Jessica Michault is an award-winning journalist, public speaker and Fashion, Luxury, Beauty consultant. She is an expert on the Middle East luxury market and has launched multiple luxury publications in the GCC. Michault's 60 Second Fashion Reviews were one of the first to bring fashion show criticism to the social media sphere, and her in-depth, one-on-one interviews with some of fashion's leading movers and shakers, via her Fashion Your Seatbelt podcast, have created another avenue for fashion lovers to connect with the industry.
She spent 16 formative years working side by side with the renowned fashion critic Suzy Menkes, as the Online Style Editor of the International Herald Tribune, before taking C-suite positions in leading luxury publications like ODDA magazine, NOWFASHION and Antidote magazine and taking up the role of SVP of Industry Relations at Launchmetrics. Over the years, she has consulted with brands such as Miu Miu, Boucheron, Mulberry and the Puig group, and her articles have been published in The New York Times, Business of Fashion and throughout multiple Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar magazines across the globe.
