. In hindsight, I realise how unusual my childhood was, but back then it was all I knew. It wasn’t long before I started to follow in my parents’ footsteps: I booked my first modelling job at just two-months-old, alongside my mother in Italian. But as I got older, I found a passion for athletics, too – basketball was my true love. Everything I wanted, I was continually told, was at my fingertips.
And so when I woke up from a medically induced coma in that Santa Monica hospital room one day in early October 2012, in excruciating pain, it wasn’t just that I was unrecognisable: I had been stripped of my entire identity, of the beauty and body that, I thought then, had made me. I had been found unresponsive at home, having suffered a fever of almost 42C, my kidneys failing. I had had two heart attacks and was given just a one per cent chance of survival.
I left hospital three months later in a wheelchair and back at home, shell-shocked, tried to come to terms with my new reality. For eight months, I would wheel myself into my bathroom and sit on a stool in the shower screaming at God, wondering why and how this happened. I didn’t think I would be loved again, I didn’t think I would be wanted – I definitely didn’t think the fashion world would ever accept me.
For a time, in my darkest moments, I was suicidal. I had to force myself to dig deep to see that beauty isn’t just found in the physical, it’s how we affect others and the world. Eventually, I came to understand that prosthetics were my route to a more independent life, but seeing the stiff, medical-looking limbs that were available, I struggled to see how I would make them me. To move forwards, I knew I had to create something that fit with my identity.