In a first, transgender woman wins model of the year at annual Fashion Awards 2024 in London

Occasionally ideological light does manage to shine through the murk of what is sometimes termed the ugly business of beautiful women. Take Alex Consani, who was named Model of the Year at the annual Fashion Awards in London on Monday.

For the first time in the three-decade history of the award, the honoree, Consani, was a transgender woman. She is a TikTok phenom with almost 4 million followers and a cavalcade of catwalk appearances (Chanel, Stella McCartney and, in another first, Victoria's Secret in October) to her name since being signed to IMG Models in 2019.

Previous winners of the award have included Naomi Campbell, Bella Hadid and Kaia Gerber. In recognizing Consani's trailblazing accomplishments, the organizers of the event, the British Fashion Council, took note of the "global impact" of a woman who has "dominated the industry," over the past year.

Whether knowingly or not, the council also honored a figure who was occasionally divisive within her own circles, a woman whose raucous viral video reels sometimes put her at odds with socially acceptable conduct. Entire platoons of Redditors exist to police the tendency of Consani, a 21-year-old white woman from Sonoma County, California, to deploy an accent imitative of the way some Black people speak.

Wearing a tattered Union Flag dress by Turkish British designer Dilara Findikoglu, Consani addressed an audience of the fashion elite with a graceful acceptance speech that seemed to defend herself from certain detractors.

(In classic frenemy style, another nominee, Anok Yai, congratulated Consani even as Yai was passed over, writing on social platform X, "Alex can be proud and I can be exhausted at the same time.")

In paying homage to Black transgender pioneers like the Mugler model Connie Fleming, Dominique Jackson and Aaron Rose Philip, Consani took note of her own advantages even as someone from a marginalized community. Black transgender women, she said, "really fought for the space -- that allowed me to flourish today."

Consani also expressed gratitude to her parents for supporting both her modeling aspirations and a transition that began in childhood. While Consani -- who, with bleached hair and eyebrows, resembles the love child of Candy Darling and the albino rocker Edgar Winter -- has stated that her true gender identity was never in doubt to her, there are few issues as hotly contested in the battle for transgender rights as the use of chemical puberty blockers.

"Now, more than ever, it's an important conversation that should be had about how to truly support and uplift one another within this industry, especially those who have been made to feel insignificant," Consani said, as she accepted her prize from model and body activist Ashley Graham and Nava Mau, transgender star of "Baby Reindeer." "Because change is more than possible -- it's needed."