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Move over Cara — Binx Walton is the American model winning all the fashion campaigns, with her mixed-race appeal and sassy attitude. Kate Spicer meets the teen who’s taking over

You probably haven’t heard of Leona “Binx” Walton, but she is one of the most successful young models working today. She might not have the famous boyfriend, the aristocratic mummy or rock’n’roll papa, but Walton, 18, is winning more campaigns than the models you have heard of, such as Kendall Jenner or even Cara Delevingne. This season, she is fronting Alexander Wang, Hugo Boss (alongside her best friend, the redhead Lexi Boling), Tom Ford, Fendi, DKNY (with Cara), NikeLab x Sacai and Coach, as well as appearing in a short film for Proenza Schouler with the elder stateswoman of Lower East Side cool, Chloë Sevigny. Olivier Rousteing enrolled her in his glamazonian “Balmain Army” as soon as he met her early last year. He says he loves her for her “hashtag diversity” and ability to “give edge to the most sophisticated looks”. (Other members of the army include Joan Smalls, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and Mr and Mrs Kanye West.)

Walton is sitting here in front of me in a Paris studio to talk about her latest role as the spokesmodel for the shoe brand Superga. She looks — there is no other word for it — like a kid, albeit a stylish one, in a loose T-shirt and black basketball shorts. She turns 19 next week and has been modelling for six years.

The casting director James Scully says Walton stands out at a time when modelling is about playing it safe. He describes a handful of the greatest editorial girls working today, freaky looking and alien-like, including Walton and Boling: “They stand out in a sea of prepubescent, blonde white girls. Binx has been in every show I’ve cast since I met her [in 2013]. The first was Tom Ford and now she has the campaign. I love a girl with personality — and she has it. She has a unique look, amazing personal style. The minute people meet her, they want her. That girl’s got longevity.” She also has a funny name, which helps. Her brothers thought she looked like the Star Wars character Jar Jar Binks: “Of course, I hated it then. Now it’s good.”

Born in California, Walton moved to Hawaii with her family as a baby and to Knoxville, Tennessee, when she was six, after her parents split up. Her jazz-musician father is a remote figure in her life. “My mom is very cool, a free spirit and my best friend. Mom taught me very well to have my opinion and say what I wanted to say.” Walton has African-American, Indian, Irish, Dutch, German and Eastern Asian heritage, but the mixed-race beauty that has made her such a standout in fashion was less of an asset at high school. At a predominantly white school, her dark skin got her racist flak, so she moved to a less academic but predominantly black school, where, sod’s law, she wasn’t black or street enough. “I wasn’t very tough. I was like ‘Hiyaaaar,’ ” she says, waving her hand like an enthusiastic nerd.

The kids at school called her an Oreo (black on the outside, white on the inside), but she handled it. Soon she came home talking and posturing with a lot more street attitude, which she puts on for me now. It was a front that helped when, aged 16, she landed her first big catwalk show: Marc Jacobs AW13. “It was crazy, 50 girls and just so many people, so much press, and Marc Jacobs there directing the whole thing.”

Clockwise from left: Moschino AW15, NikeLab x Sacai SS15,
Tom Ford SS15, Fendi SS15 and pulling faces with Suki Waterhouse

Her career went from zero to stellar. Her latest triumph is nailing the spokesmodel gig for Superga. (It’s pronounced sue-purr-ga, so you’ve almost certainly been saying it wrong your whole life.) Walton will design a range and be involved in creating short films for them, as well as fronting its campaign. It’s an interesting choice by Superga, given that their past few faces, including Rita Ora, Alexa Chung and Suki Waterhouse, have had serious celebrity stock. “Hey, why wouldn’t they do that?” she says of the decision by brands to use famous faces. “It’s a smart idea, it gets your brand out there. It’s just that it hurts the people who don’t...” She stops and starts several times. It obviously bothers her — she described the fashion season just gone on Twitter as “the season of the entitled”.

“I know one girl I met when I was 16,” she says. “She was from the Middle East and somehow her parents let her model. She was feeding her family. She was beautiful, nice, sweet, she had personality, like you could actually hold a sustainable conversation with her. But she didn’t do well because she didn’t have the social media. It just sucks to see that. That hurts me.”

Walton and Cara Delevingne in a Chanel's Fall 2014 campaign

Walton says social media and celebrity divides fashion professionals: “Some respect it, some don’t. It’s an opinion.” Clearly, she sees a difference between models like her and the ones with celebrity capital, such as the Kardashian-spawned Jenner (22.1m Instagram followers) and Gigi Hadid (2.5m), whose mother is in The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. As we go into this conversation, it seems only fair to Walton (91,000) that I set the record straight about something I have been told she will not talk about: the Kendall Jenner “thing”. The “thing” was that her aforementioned bestie, Boling, posted a sarcastic comment beneath an unflattering shot of Jenner, mid-hair and make-up, posted on the Vogue Germany Instagram feed. Walton responded with a few crying-with-laughter emojis and the words: “That’s f***** up.”

The two earned themselves a somewhat unfair reputation as the Mean Girls of modelling. Walton breezes over it. “We’re cool. She’s a nice girl. Kendall knows me and Lexi are very sarcastic, and it was a funny picture. I posted a really ugly picture of me and Lexi looking like... [she pulls a sequence of eyes-half-closed double-chin bad picture faces] Because it’s funny. People take it all way too seriously. Kendall Jenner’s done great shows and I don’t have a problem with her. She doesn’t affect my career in any single way. If people don’t like her, I doubt it bothers her. I’m sure she’s been dealing with that her whole life.”

‘I wanted to be more like my brothers than my sister — they seemed like they were having more fun’

Outside work, Walton tries not to talk about fashion. She and Boling are off to Amsterdam tomorrow for a bit of post-fashion week recuperation. “I’ve never been.” Will she smoke up a storm? “Mmm, no, of course not. I plead the fifth,” she laughs, then mumbles, “Yeah, probably.” This is not the kind of girl who tongs her hair and wears false eyelashes. As a child, “I wanted to be like my brothers rather than my sister, simply because they seemed like they were having more fun”. She describes an epiphany at about four or five, when she lived in Hawaii. “We used to go to the zoo. My parents knew the janitors, who would always let us in so we could hang out with the elephants, which was extremely cool. We would touch the elephants and my sister would just start crying.”

She believes in living life for real, despite the fact that most of her generation seem to be living it through social media most of the time. “Somebody could be very boring in person and not have much to say about anything — their whole life is on their phone. But on Instagram, it looks like they have the best life ever. They seem to always be at festivals, at parties, but, in reality, when you really look at them, they’re on their phone in the corner doing a selfie.” In other words, they aren’t touching the elephant, which sounds like a useful metaphor for life. “Yeah,” she says. “It means, ‘Have more fun and don’t be boring.’”

The girl who isn’t scared to touch the elephant then lets me take a picture of her looking ugly for my Instagram feed and goes back to being the top model in the world you’ve probably never heard of.

Binx x Superga is on sale now; superga.co.uk