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In a subterranean bunker beneath Paris, Alton Mason materializes to a soundtrack of ear-splitting German techno. Wearing a long black coat and colossal platform boots, ropes of thick, braided hair framing his fiercely angular face, he looks like a Marvel hero flirting with the dark side. We’re in the concrete basement of the Palais de Tokyo, about a half hour before Mason will walk in the Rick Owens fall-winter 2023 runway show, and Mason is wrestling with a decision, stroking the goatee that dusts his cantilevered jawline.
“Rick comes to me about an hour ago,” Mason tells me, “and says, ‘It’s totally up to you, but do you want to shave your beard?’ ”
I had noticed, standing among the room of towering, wraithlike figures who would soon be joining Mason on the runway, that not one other model had so much as a single whisker on their mug. That’s the vibe on the Rick Owens runway. Smooth faces, blank bodies. The models serve as canvases that are modified by the several dozen hairstylists and makeup artists to perfectly fulfill Owens’s singular vision for the season. In the room, some makeup artists paint thick black V’s on the boys’ faces. Others squish malevolent black lenses onto the models’ corneas.
“But,” Mason continues, “Rick said, ‘It’s up to you, you don’t have to.’ I was like, Hmmm…” Mason strokes his chin again. “He was just like, ‘Think about it,’ and then walks away.”
That this conversation transpires at all is illustrative of the rare position Alton Mason holds in the world of men’s fashion in 2023. Practically every other male model is treated like a sexy cog, a figure whose individuality is molded to serve a higher aesthetic vision. Mason is not an equal to the designers, not yet at least, but he’s something exceedingly rare: a male model who’s granted tremendous deference, legitimate agency, and a power-brokering say in the fashion world right now—and, increasingly, in other creative industries.
Which is all to say: When a male model comes along who verges on being as close to a household name as we’ve had since Tyson Beckford, he doesn’t have to shave if he doesn’t want to.
There is, of course, a term for this lofty perch. Mason, who is 25, is a supermodel—one of the only men working today with such a title, which makes him one of the most famous and influential professionally beautiful men in the world. Based on industry polling, Models.com has named him the Model of the Year for an unprecedented five years in a row. In 2018, he became the first Black male model to walk for Chanel, which was widely hailed as a historic moment. In 2019, he did an impromptu series of backflips on the Louis Vuitton runway, which cemented his status as a muse to Virgil Abloh and an individual talent capable of creating one of the more breathtaking moments of the current fashion era. (Soon after, 3D-printed models of an inverted Mason appeared in Louis Vuitton stores around the world.) In 2022 he made his Hollywood debut in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, in a brief but electrifying cameo as Little Richard.
Today, Mason is entering a new tier of celebrity, a Met Gala regular with over a million Instagram followers who lays his head in five-star hotel suites the world over. As we chat in Paris, a couple of young models, his peers for the afternoon in the Owens show, ask him for a selfie. They are beautiful, but the contrast between them is real. Mason used to look very young and skinny, “a brown boy next door,” as Bethann Hardison, the pioneering model and advocate who led the charge for diversity on the runways starting in the 1970s, puts it to me. Now, he’s got action-figure-level sculpted abs and pecs. He’s got a goatee. The other models, who look like slightly emaciated Ken dolls that have spent all day being poked, prodded, and dressed up, do not. Alton is a leading man among extras. When he smiles for the photo, the concrete lair feels several watts brighter.
Not long after, he stomps down the runway at the Owens show, facial hair intact.
There’s no official industry-governing body that determines when a mere model morphs into a super, but there are a few prerequisites. One is sheer ubiquity. Mason told me he doesn’t keep track of his work by the numbers, but by my rough count, he’s walked in 150 fashion shows and appeared in about 90 campaigns since his major modeling debut in 2016. There are some models who have walked more runways, others whose willowy bodies can wriggle into just about any sartorial universe. But I don’t know many of their names. Mason, on the other hand, has a unique range. He can bring the house down at Dolce & Gabbana in Milan, hitting the runway to cheers and a sea of raised iPhones. But then you’ll also see his face in fragrance advertisements in the airport and Zara posters anywhere there is a Zara. All told, his commercial clients read like the Ssense brand page and his editorial clients could fill Casa Magazines in New York several times over.
Mason’s imposing presence in the industry reflects the ease with which he inhabits each role. “He’s got that star thing,” says Fear of God founder Jerry Lorenzo, who regularly works with Mason. It’s hard to overstate just how different the experience of interacting with Mason is from most male models you might meet backstage at a fashion show, who are invariably very young, and often immature and nervous. Mason, on the other hand, is deeply self-possessed. His wide smile dances across his face easily and often, and he exudes a sense of twinkling curiosity you don’t expect in people of rare beauty. He speaks firmly but with a softness that invites you to lean in a little closer. He is incredibly polite and acutely devout, speaking often of God’s plan for his life.
“When the camera comes on, Alton can become what you would like him to become within the context of who he is,” says Lorenzo. “He doesn’t lose himself. He’s always still Alton, but he’s also a hundred percent the character that you’ve asked him for, which is a super-rare talent.”
Perhaps the most important factor in reaching supermodel-dom is simply believing you are one, and acting accordingly. “I thank God for gifting me with the presence that separates me from being just another hanger, or a mannequin, and allowing me to redefine what it means to be a male supermodel,” Mason said while accepting GQ Australia’s Model of the Year award in 2019. Supermodels reach for something higher than simply looking good in front of a camera. Mason has grown into the lifestyle one might expect: partying with Leonardo DiCaprio, vacationing with Naomi Campbell, and gracing red carpets on seemingly a weekly basis. But he also has ambitions for a more widely defined career, which, if they pan out, could truly redefine what his role means.
“This is just the beginning,” he told me at one point this spring. “It’s bigger than me.” Mason had recently wrapped up an appearance as an influencer in the upcoming A24 flick Dream Scenario, which stars Nick Cage, whom Mason had recently appeared alongside in a campaign for the fashion brand Casablanca. We were speaking over Zoom, because Mason doesn’t know where he’ll be four days from any given point in time, which makes scheduling face-to-face encounters challenging. Mason told me he couldn’t reveal anything about the film or his role in it before saying, “It’s super trippy. It takes place in the future, and I think it really highlights and magnifies the human mind and influence and social intelligence. It’s pretty fly. It’s pretty dope.”
Models have wanted to be actors practically since the invention of moving pictures. Mason said a couple trips to the Cannes Film Festival had got him hooked on the event’s “magnetic energy,” a world that might feel bigger than the glamorous but niche confines of Paris Fashion Week. I asked him to characterize his trajectory in the film world. “Starting out as a male model,” he said, “I didn’t know that I would reach these heights in fashion. So I really don’t have any expectations. I’m just going to show up. I’m going to experiment. I’m going to be daring, I’m going to be willing to try new things, and we’ll just see where that takes me. I love surrendering to that.”
“I don’t think Alton has any cap on his ambition as an artist,” Baz Luhrmann tells me, “whether that be acting, modeling, moving, or singing.” (Mason is, naturally, also hard at work on an album.)
Mason is not leaving the fashion world behind, though—far from it. “As soon as Dream Scenario was over, I was back on the plane, back on set, shooting, doing shows, traveling. And since that was my first movie since doing Elvis, I think I was open and enlightened to the idea of being able to do everything all at once,” he said, before filling in the broad strokes of his future in fashion: “I really can’t wait to creative direct and have my own fashion line. I want to be a house.”
The central paradox of Mason’s line of work is that though the men’s fashion industry today wields unprecedented cultural and commercial influence, it is harder than ever to make a career as a model. At the fundamental economic level, there’s been an influx of labor, accelerated by social media, which makes it easier for agents and casting directors to scout new faces. Once you’re in, longevity is not guaranteed. The look of models is as trendy as the clothes they are wearing. One season, models of West African descent might dominate; the next, they’ll be South Asian. A particularly zeitgeisty kind of casting director might not even employ agency models, but specialize in street casting funky-looking amateurs.
“It’s very hard to build a career in an industry that’s overrun with talent,” says Bethann Hardison, who discovered the industry’s first Black male supermodel, Tyson Beckford, in the ’90s. “There has to be destiny included for models to survive.”
Mason was born in Nebraska in 1997, to a soundtrack of Makaveli by Tupac. Mom was a model herself and Dad was a professional basketball player whose peripatetic career took the family to 11 countries in 13 years, before they settled in Phoenix. Mason says it was hard to always be the new kid in Belgium or Greece, but he doesn’t seem to have had any problems making friends. “I created a jerkin’ crew at my school in Amsterdam,” he told me. “It was crazy.”
At a young age, he was already fearless under the spotlight. He discovered a gift for dance by shimmying with his siblings in the family living room, and he began performing at halftime at his dad’s basketball games, a 12-year-old absolutely nailing Chris Brown’s “I Can Transform Ya” routine before an audience of presumably amused Dutch people.
Once his family landed back in the States, Mason went to the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in Los Angeles for college to focus on honing his gift. Mason said they couldn’t really afford it, but he could already see the bigger picture. Before his parents dropped him off, Mason cried. “I said, ‘Mom, it’s okay. I’m not going to be here for long. I’m going to make something out of this. Watch.’ ”
Soon enough, in 2016, Mason found himself living in a shared model apartment in New York. He had been scouted on Instagram, and was experiencing firsthand the less than glamorous lifestyle naive young male models face as they try to break into the industry. “I’m eating dollar pizzas, my skin’s breaking out, I’m jumping the trains, I don’t have no money,” Mason recalled. He was going to a lot of castings but wasn’t getting any bites. He was simply one sexy cog among many sexy cogs, just another face in a modeling milieu that, despite the rise of the Influencer Age, was remarkably conformist. “I remember talking to my agent, my agent’s like, ‘Wear a black T-shirt, black pants,’ and I would, but so would everybody else,” he said.
Mason discovered that his competitive advantage was to seize on his individuality. To bet that male models would soon become influencers, rather than the other way around. To give casting directors something to remember him by. “I had to find a way to stand out,” he said. “And the only way that that would be possible was to be myself.” He started showing up to castings in faux-fur coats, leather pants, and Tabi boots. “Once I started honing in on who I was and how I wanted to show up, that’s when I would get the second look. Who is that? Bring him in. Let’s ask him questions.”
As Mason dreamed of hitting the runways of Paris and Milan, he looked to an iconic rule breaker for inspiration: Naomi Campbell. “For me, the power and the presence and the aura came from women,” Mason said. “I studied Naomi Campbell and would apply that to my walk.” It shows. On the runway, Mason keeps his head as still as a marathon runner’s, pumping his hips with the fierceness that made Campbell one of the most renowned supermodels in history. “I would hear, ‘Oh, your walk is good, but your hips are too feminine,’ ” he recalled.
Ultimately, a confluence of external factors helped give Mason the big break he had been dreaming of. In 2016, several prominent designers held runway shows that featured no models of color. Against that backdrop, Kanye West cast only Black and brown models for Yeezy Season 3, his epic fashion show turned album listening party at Madison Square Garden. Mason was picked out of a blocks-long line at an open casting call. It was a welcome turn of events for the 18-year-old, who had been crashing with a family friend in Brooklyn after discovering that his agency was charging him for the model apartment. He was getting somewhere—slowly. “That Yeezy show was definitely a launching pad, but I still went home pretty broke,” Mason said. “But I got a taste of what this could be, if you commit and keep going through these castings.”
Meanwhile, in Europe, casting directors were looking for a softer side of masculinity as the hunk’s dominance waned, and Mason’s feline sense of movement and boyish looks fit the bill. Gucci flew him to Rome to meet with then creative director Alessandro Michele. Michele, too, was casting a campaign that would exclusively feature Black models—a first in the house’s history. It was another rare opportunity for Mason, the right model at the right time. He seized that opportunity, too, busting out his best James Brown moves for Michele. “I danced for him and his team in the room with no music playing. It was awkward, but I’m like, I got to show them what it’s about,” Mason recalled. When he landed back in New York, he told me, his agents called—Gucci wanted to sign him to an exclusive contract. Just like that, Mason was the hottest new face in men’s fashion.
In Mason, Hardison sees a revival of the type of models who rose to the top during her era. “The great thing when we modeled is that the designers hoped you brought your personality,” she says. “They hoped you brought you, because they needed you to get into their clothes so that you could bring their clothes to life. And that’s what’s important—that’s how models become muses.”
“A lot of models don’t know their purpose,” she says. “Alton knows his purpose.”
Today, Alton Mason’s phone rings off the hook, day in and day out. Unlike in the ’90s, when a supermodel like Tyson Beckford could grace billboards and newsstands all over the world thanks to a big-time contract with Ralph Lauren, Mason takes on a constant stream of work with everyone from BMW to Balenciaga. And they don’t want just his physique or his face or his hair or his goatee—they want him. Through his singular style and nimble movement, Mason has helped usher in a new age of male modeling.
It can often feel as though designers build their shows around him. At the Fear of God show at the Hollywood Bowl in April, Jerry Lorenzo entrusted Mason to showcase the final look. The visual reference they agreed upon was: Black Jesus. “Alton can look like a pretty baby, or he can look like a grown Black Jesus,” Lorenzo tells me. “He has that thing with his face where he can be soft or he can be super strong—he’s got this malleability about the way he looks.” He also is clutch in the big moment. It was the 10-year-old brand’s first fashion show, and the stakes for Lorenzo were high. Which is precisely why he selected Mason. “The last thing I wanted to worry about was how is someone going to perform on this type of stage?”
While the rest of a cast are told to march to the beat and get out of the way, Mason is now regularly granted freedom to improvise. That night at the Hollywood Bowl, Mason hit the long runway, bare chest rippling under an oversized fur coat. “The ask was just kind of: Go down, turn around, and come back,” says Lorenzo. When Mason reached the end of the runway, there was a pause. Thousands of iPhones were trained on him—each prepared to maybe capture a backflip. Instead, he flung his head back, and raised his arms up as if on a cross. The effect was unmistakable: Black Jesus was in the building. As the crowd went nuts, he swaggered back down the runway.
“He just had this instinctual understanding of what that closing moment was beyond anyone else,” says Lorenzo, who was thrilled. “I didn’t ask him to do that. I couldn’t have scripted that. And as I started to see videos later and hear peoples’ reactions to it, I was like, Wow, he saw something I didn’t see. And that’s what you’re hoping for when you bring on other creatives, other designers, models, or artists. When you’re bringing together anyone to help you tell a story, you’re hoping they bring a perspective that you can’t bring.”
It’s no wonder, as Mason told me, Naomi Campbell has called him the male version of her. Meaning an iconoclast, a force of nature, a trailblazer. Larger than life.
It seems he’s already changed the game for up-and-comers, many of whom now show up to castings dressed kind of like Mason, whose mix of global fashion influences turned him into a street style star. According to several models I’ve spoken with over the past few years, agents now encourage young signees to develop extracurricular skills and let their personalities shine on social media. “Alton’s elevated what it means to be a model,” said a young man who has walked in several shows with him. “He’s an inspiration, genuinely.” Many now aspire to not just walk the runway but sit front row at shows, as Mason has done at Balenciaga, Fendi, and Kenzo.
I asked Mason about growing into a leader for young models. I brought up the guys backstage at Rick Owens who asked for a selfie. “That always fills my heart,” he said. “I have models that come to me and say, ‘Alton, you are the reason why I started to do this. My agent told me to just watch what you are doing and do what you do. And now I’m doing my first show with you.’ ”
Mason told me that these interactions can leave him in tears. They remind him just how far he’s come. “I remember being the boy who went to 20 castings in one day, taking the train and the buses just to get that one show, my first show,” he said. “It’s a reminder that it’s bigger than me.”
Samuel Hine is GQ’s fashion writer.
The interviews and photo shoot for this story were conducted prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike.
A version of this story originally appeared in the September 2023 issue of GQ with the title “How Alton Mason Became the World’s Only Male Supermodel”
Via gq.com
