gloss meets grounding

After a decade of global campaigns & long-haul flights, Nidhi Sunil's body called time. What followed was a quieter kind of revolution, notes Ipsita Kaul

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When Nidhi Sunil first appeared on the cover of ELLE India back in 2011, she was unsuspecting of where her life's twists and turns would eventually lead her. Too dark, too short-people were quick to label her in outmoded parrot tones. “But that cover was special. Your team didn’t edit my skin. I looked like my true South Indian self,” she recalls. Sunil is easily one of our finest exports to the west—which Indian model can boast of a L'Oreal Paris contract in her kitty?! Back in 2021, she became the first Indian model to achieve this feat. Over the years, she has fronted numerous international campaigns (Gundi Studios was iconic), done runways scarcely, enjoyed the world of high-fashion editorials and used her global platform to advocate for diversity and ethical beauty. These campaigns portray her, rightly, as a global muse rather than just a moment. It's her grounded resolution, as visible on the Zoom call she joined via Mexico on a trip, that has, seemingly, carried her into this rarefied club replete with international notoriety.

Sunil’s life is rich in stories. You can easily picture her years from now, at a sunlit lunch in Italy, family gathered around as future generations hang on to every anecdote. She embodies that kind of effortless cool. For instance, there’s this story of how she once enrolled in a French course, just to obtain a visa to fly to Paris for a campaign-icône absolue. She insists that modelling isn’t a career one can plot with precision. “It’s volatile. You can't make a list of goals and check them off. So much depends on what the gatekeepers think of you.” What she can count on now, in her late 30s is persistence and a quiet conviction that has kept her showing up, no matter the odds.