It is slightly embarrassing not to recognise one of the world’s leading supermodels, especially when you’re specifically checking out a Brooklyn restaurant for a 5’11” black woman who comes from the Sudan. Yet it was easy to miss Alek Wek when she strolled in for lunch the other day.

There was nothing remotely glamorous about the skinny figure in a green headscarf as she waited to be seated at the iCi (sic) café on De Kalb Avenue. She wore dark slacks, a lumberjack shirt and no visible make-up, and looked for all the world as if she was taking a break from fixing the plumbing at her house around the corner.

Which, it turns out, was exactly what Wek was doing. There are no celebrity airs or graces to the former African refugee whose career took off after she was spotted by a modeling agent at a street market in London in 1995.

You won’t find Wek arriving by Bentley to perform court-ordered community service after another brush with the law. She doesn’t throw furniture at her maids. She doesn’t hang out with dope-addled rock stars. She has somehow survived a dozen years in the modelling business without having to go into rehab.

Yet the story Wek is here to tell beats any amount of nightclub lowlife. Her book on her escape from the Sudanese civil war in 1991 has earned her a very different kind of media attention. At the age of 30, when many models peer gloomily into the mirror each morning and wonder if they will ever stride another catwalk, Wek has become so busy she really doesn’t care how many fashion shows she misses.

“I did those shows for so long to establish my career,” she said. “But I’m not going to spend forever running around with 17 and 18-year-old models. This is about me evolving as a person”.

It was a process that started with her return to Sudan with her mother, Akuol, and other members of her Dinka family three years ago. Quite apart from her own feelings at revisiting the country she had fled with her ailing father – who was later to die in exile – Wek also underwent a dramatic transformation in her relationship with her mother.

“I don’t think I ever realised that she hadn’t seen her own family for 22 years,” Wek said. “Going back there brought back her own memories, and I saw her break down. I was just so moved. She had always been the strong one when we were living in Khartoum and then in London. I realised she was more than just my mother. She had had such a difficult life, and I began to have conversations that I’d never had with her before”.

Returning to Brooklyn and the fashion circuit, Wek became determined to put her family’s story into writing. “I felt I needed to do it, and I knew I would have to explain the whole story. Some things you don’t necessarily want to revisit very vividly, but you have to go ahead”.

The months of work with a ghost-writer brought her even closer to her mother. “Sometimes I was calling her every other hour, and at times I felt like I was really bothering her. But she loved it – at last her daughter was calling her all the time….”

Akuol Wek has never been keen on Alek’s modeling career and has never seen her on a catwalk. “She was always, like: ‘Not this modeling business, further your education’,” Wek said.

For years Wek had to endure a running maternal commentary on her appearances in magazines. “She would say, ‘You look very strange in these photographs,’ or ‘These outfits are quite ridiculous’,” said Wek, who was the seventh of nine children. “But in a sense it gave me an incentive – not to let her down”.

Mother still worries about what Alek is eating, how much rest she’s getting and when she’s going to get married (she shares her Brooklyn home with Riccardo Sala, a real estate developer), but Wek has learned not to mind.

“When you’ve had children and managed to raise them through such hard times, you have a different perspective,” she said. “Not everything has to be about money or success”.

Wek has even begun to worry herself - about the demands made on younger models, how much they are eating, and what effect the fashion business may be having on the latest catwalk generation. “I thought I was young when I started at 19,” she said. “I can’t imagine what it’s like at 16”.

Yet the one thing she doesn’t seem to worry about is how much longer her own career will last. “Yes, there’s always a bus pulling up with new girls, but if you think about that you’ll go nuts,” she said.

She is busy developing her own handbag business, and she will soon be headed to Europe to promote her book. But for now, the most pressing question for Wek is as down-to-earth as it gets. Does anyone know a good plumber in Brooklyn ?

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