Facing the World

Vogue's first-ever global open-casting initiative gathered 60,000 submissions, from everywhere on Earth. Here are eight finalists.

- LAIA GARCIA-FURTADO

Few things remain as alluring as the stories of how our most well-known models were discovered: Shalom Harlow, then 17, was attending a concert by the Cure in Toronto; Naomi Campbell, then 15, was window-shopping in Covent Garden when a modeling scout approached her; Linda Evangelista, 16, had just lost the Miss Teen Niagara pageant when she was “discovered” by an agent for Elite. Perhaps most famously, Kate Moss was waiting to board a plane headed back to her London home after a holiday in the Bahamas when she caught the eye of the founder of a new modeling agency, Storm. A year later, the photographer Corinne Day found her photo in a drawer at the agency and saw in her a reflection of where culture was headed—away from the glamazon women that dominated the late 1980s and into a beauty that was more natural, more real—and Moss became a global icon.

The possibility that stardom could be lurking just around the corner has fed fashion fantasies for decades. These days, discoveries are more likely to take place on social media than in the street (in 2015, legendary makeup artist Pat McGrath cast a then unknown Paloma Elsesser after coming across her Instagram account)—a thrilling evolution that has nonetheless disrupted an entire industry, particularly as definitions of beauty and the very notion of what a model can or should look like have exploded in recent years.