Anok Yai details racist comments from an unnamed Zara photographer

In a now-deleted thread on her X (formerly Twitter) account, US model Anok Yai shared details of a racist incident that took place on a photoshoot for Spanish retailer Zara. “Who wants to hear a story?” the model began on May 20, before outlining the alleged comments in the following tweets. “I remember in 2019 being called a cockroach by a photographer. It was from this brand that I used to always work with. I didn’t speak their language and they didn’t speak mine but regardless we were on set shooting look after look after look.”

Yai then went on to reveal how “on the 2nd to last day the makeup artist starts powdering my face and the photographer puts his camera down and yells ‘lotion la cucaracha’,” meaning “lotion the cockroach” in Spanish. According to Yai, after the unnamed photographer’s comment “everyone on set starts smiling and laughing.”

Just after the racist incident – which a source claims happened in 2018, rather than 2019 as Yai claimed – the model remembered feeling how she couldn’t “react the way I [wanted] to react because at the end of the day I’m young, I’m alone, I’m black… anything that I do will affect me, my family, and other black models.”

In the same thread, Yai also recalled refusing to return to set the next morning if the photographer was still present, to which an unnamed Zara team member allegedly responded, “‘we don’t accept that type of behaviour, we’ll fire him now. Tell me who he is and we’ll get rid of him’.”

Despite this promise, when Yai returned to the set the photographer “walks by me and smiles.” Someone from the Zara team is then alleged to have told the distressed model, ‘“I asked the team what happened and they said you made it up. Honestly, whenever you come here, you’re never smiling and you’re never happy to be here.”

“By now, there’s tears running down my face,” continued Yai in the tweets. “I told her I wasn’t lying, she still doesn’t believe me. But I could tell she wanted me to sit down and shut up so I forced them to call my car to the airport and pay my full rate regardless. I remember wanting to come out with the story to magazines but I was told ‘think about your career’. That was my first (and not only) time being blacklisted.”

Though Yai had declined to mention any names or brands throughout her story, she then concluded the thread with the single tweet: “Hi bitch @ZARA. Remember me?”

With many fashion brands promising to ‘do better’ when it came to diversity and inclusion in the wake of the global Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, it may be that Zara took a look inwards and began to iron out its flaws. However, the fact Yai has chosen to speak out on this publicly suggests the industry still has a long way to go. 

Dazed reached out to Zara for comment but at the time of writing a representative for the brand confirmed it declined to comment.

To revist our winter 2023 cover shoot with Yai, click through the gallery above.