The Somali-born, London-raised model and athlete on her unanticipated experience of the games and love for Maria Grazia Chiuri’s vision for the house.
collection she presented yesterday. Punctuating the wide range of poppy, slim-line looks —an homage to the aesthetic pioneered by former Dior Creative Director Marc Bohan in the 60s — that set the template for this season were a neat series of sporty boxing separates. They were, Maria Grazia told us, both a direct nod to Ramla and an acknowledgment of the fact that “sports helped to emancipate women. It was impossible for women to be in the Olympic Games, and they had to fight for it.
Here, she fills us in on her new book, her unexpected Olympic experience and what embodies the spirit of Dior for her.**Relentless, competitive, considerate, ambitious, dedicated.**I was 12 years old, dangerously overweight and unsure of myself. I was drawn into boxing through a boxercise class. I got into the sport long before social media and before there was so much free and available information on general health and exercise, and I loved the idea of being told what to do.
**You recently competed in the Tokyo Olympics. What are the memories you cherish most from the experience? **Very little, to be honest, but I’m grateful and blessed to have raised the flag for Somalia, to have become the first Somali to have ever competed in the sport of boxing at the Olympics, and to have inspired a new generation of other young women to pursue a career in sport. That aside, it wasn’t the games I had hoped for. I went there unfunded by my country. We were the only team in the whole games who didn’t have a team tracksuit until the day of the opening ceremony.