Star Struck Style

April 16 is Alek Wek’s birthday.

I’ve always been a big fan of Alek Wek. I don’t know that much about her personally, but I know that she is considered to be a trailblazer in the modeling world. For that reason, I guess it should come as no surprise that she’s an Aries.

She could possibly have an Aries moon, too: the moon moved out of Pisces and into Aries in the early hours of the morning on the day that she was born. She also has Venus in Aries, although it is retrograde, in its detriment, and not close enough to the sun or the moon to form even the loosest conjunction.

Nevertheless, she obviously does possess the pioneering spirit associated with her sun sign. When she first broke onto the modeling scene in the mid-nineties, no one had really seen anyone quite like her on the runways of major designers. Oprah Winfrey quite famously said that “if she had been on the cover of a magazine when I was growing up, I would have had a different concept of who I was.”

But does Wek deserve all the credit? People sometimes forget how diverse the catwalk was during the mid-nineties. Wek made her name in fashion alongside models like Devon Aoki, Eve Salvail, Yasmeen Ghauri and Irina Pataeva. Sure, the first decade of the twenty-first century was pretty much a whitewash, but that doesn’t change the fact that the world of fashion was pretty cool and pretty inclusive in the nineties.

Still, if it wasn’t for girls like Alek Wek, we might not have girls like Adut Akech rising to the upper echelons of the industry today. I’ll give her credit where credit is due. And astrologically speaking, she did it with a natal chart that doesn’t even look very lucky to me. With Venus in Aries, Jupiter in Gemini and Saturn in Leo, she certainly didn’t have the stars on her side.