Sami is not your typical model. She is quirky, funny, unbothered, and Afro-Italian. We met for a brief moment at Afropunk London five years ago, exchanged socials, and never spoke again. And yet, something about her laugh stayed with me. I followed her career from afar as she modelled for Vogue Italia and ID, worked with Maison Valentino, and became a stylist for renowned magazines like Vanity Fair Italia.
Signed to BADD, an agency by Monster Management, Sami is part of an emerging wave of creatives that break the limits of Italian fashion’s traditional ways. “There are two types of fashion in Italy,” she explains to me on a video call, “the classic size, height, look – and then there’s ‘us’. We are young, diverse and different. We are a different look and a different market.”
Don’t define me
Sami’s real name is Sarah Misciali. “People call me Sami because of my Instagram,” she laughs. “I like it. It became my new persona.” Sami does it all: she started off modelling, then became an assistant on set, draws her own collections, and is now working in production and styling. Still, she does not subscribe to any labels. “I don’t like to define myself, because I feel like tomorrow I’m gonna change my mind and become a rapper,” she grins.
Quite randomly born in Islamabad, Pakistan, to a Nigerian mother and an Italian father who was working there at the time, Sami spent her childhood years moving from the Philippines to Nigeria to Udine, a small Italian town near Venice. She eventually moved to Milan, where it was impossible to avoid fashion. “Paris, New York, and London are so big, you don’t even notice when fashion week is going on,” she says. “In Milan it’s everywhere.” But she hadn’t come there to do fashion; she'd come to study marketing. “I was in denial for a while,” she remembers, “I thought ‘fashion? Nahh, that’s not me!’ Then, I organised a photoshoot as coursework for this history exam, and my teacher said, ‘why are you doing marketing’?”
Once her Instagram aesthetics had landed her modelling jobs, she would ask the people working on set if she could be their assistant. After three years of freelance work and applying to agencies that told her to “either be curvy and gain weight, or lose weight,” she found a home with BADD. Sami’s style is inspired by the different parts that make up her identity and character: Milan, the city that told her to do fashion, her smile, which hides in the funny little details that remind us to take ourselves less seriously, and by Nollywood, which is always in her mood boards. “I’m a super fan. The fashion is so on point,” she laughs. “The drama, the wigs and accessories are amazing to me.”
Afro-Italiana
Sami’s aesthetic world is fluid. It invites play, colours, and tolerance – which she misses in her communities. “I have a love-hate relationship with Milan. I love it for the opportunities and meeting people from different countries, but at the same time there are a lot of patronising people and brands are ‘trying’, but not really,” she explains, referring to the whiteness of the industry. “For example, they’ll hire a Black model but no Black hair stylists and makeup artists.”
She often has to do her hair herself because no one else knows how to. “They often don’t know how to deal with my body and size, and make me feel like I'm weird.” In 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement swept across Europe and revitalised many Afropean identity crises. “In Italy, there’s no community like in the UK and France. People here don’t say something like ‘Black British’. You say ‘Nigerian-Italian’ ,” explains Sami. There was much to unpack and at the height of the protests, she received a lot of fashion jobs that wanted her to share her political opinion.
For a while, Sami’s face was on campaigns all over my instagram feed, proudly claiming space for Afro-Italian life and fashion. She has since backtracked, saying “when you're Black and doing Black politics on social media, your opinions create this persona that’s not you.” Sami’s life is not Black and white, but her politically active persona had to fit into one of these boxes. She found herself confined to a specific community and unable to express her personal experiences as a mixed woman whenever they were not in line with the wider, more popular narrative. Microaggressions and intolerant Afro-Italian spaces made her want to be less visible and step down from being a spokesperson for a community that failed to be supportive of her lived identity as a Black woman.
Making Bold Fashion Statements Through the Art of Head Wrapping
"I have a love-hate relationship with Milan. I love it for the opportunities and meeting people from different countries, but at the same time there are a lot of patronising people and brands are ‘trying’, but not really."
Fashion should be fun
While it seems that the Afro-Italian communities she has encountered have yet to embrace each other’s experiences with open minds, Sami and her friends are undeterred in decorating the world as they like. Currently ‘in her lab doing tests’, she is working on her own fashion creations which are sure to shake up Milanese traditions. “I would only sell them if they’re completely recycled,” she says. “For now, I want to grow as a stylist with my personal projects. I’d like to bring more fun to the fashion world and inspire people to be themselves. It sounds lame, but it’s so true – when you’re insecure you lose yourself.”
Sami speaks from experience, remembering moments when she felt like she was losing her identity in the creative world. “It’s really hard, I'm not gonna lie. I am an overthinker, sometimes I feel like it’s me against the world and I can only count on myself. But we’re all emotional, we [mess] up. Then we get over it and remember that it’s okay, you don’t have to be perfect today.”