Jessica Gomes: industry was "prone to white, girl-next-door-looking girls". Credit:Simon Upton Australian fashion is sloughing off a layer of conservatism, replacing it with a fresh, emerging dynamic - and modelling is perhaps its most vibrant new incarnation. "The world has changed," says Karen Webster, who chairs the Australian Fashion Council. "We're an active participant in a global world - we don't think in a mono-focused way. But additionally, Australia is so much more multicultural. There's no one look any more." As the local fashion industry has burgeoned - every state capital now has its own fashion week, while Sass & Bide, Dion Lee and Willow represent the country in international showcases - so has the modelling industry, with model searches and competitions opening up the field. "There are more girls from more diverse backgrounds thinking, 'Even though I look different, I want to give it a go,' " says Ward. Twenty-five per cent of Chic's book is now filled with mixed-race models. Multiculturalism is creeping, stealthy and unstoppable, into the beauty lexicon. When 28-year-old Gomes, who is fresh from shooting a worldwide Clinique cosmetics campaign, started out, leaving her Perth school at 17 to become the model she had dreamed of, the industry was still, she says, "prone to white, girl-next-door-looking girls".

Shanina Shaik. Hungry for work, the tenacious Gomes headed to Asia, where heavy-hitting brands responded with open arms. Then came New York and Korea - where the hip-hop fan is a household name, thanks to a stint on the local answer to Dancing with the Stars. Yet just last year, the half Singaporean-Chinese, half Portuguese Gomes was told by a fashion designer that David Jones "would never hire an Asian girl to be an ambassador". She is now a face of the department store. It's largely her leaving Australia, Gomes believes, that has propelled her to fame with her home crowd. "It's almost like you've got to go overseas to get your gold medals and then Australia goes, 'Oh, yeah, they're amazing,'" she says. "I feel like things are changing, ethnic beauty is more sought after, and because we're so close to Asia, it's becoming a melting pot - people are looking at that beauty as something they can relate to." Shaik can relate. The 22-year-old - who had a hiatus from her Melbourne school when she was 14 because she was so badly bullied for her looks - has made New York her home, having found the Australian market "wasn't working" for her.

"My first week in New York," she recalls, "I was on hold for Victoria's Secret, I booked a hair campaign on my second day and they were talking about using me for Maybelline, to take Adriana Lima's spot. My first week there! How does a 17-year-old girl [go there] and get all that in less than a week?" Needless to say, Shaik's star seems to be on an unstoppable trajectory, with the half Pakistani-Saudi, half Australian-Lithuanian - who also has two half-Chinese half-brothers and a Ghanaian stepdad - now best known as a Victoria's Secret "angel". Harris's story is less circuitous. She's turned down work abroad, banking on an Australian appeal that seems to have taken the 22-year-old by surprise. "When I first started modelling, I thought, 'Oh, I don't look like every other model,'" Harris says, adding, "It didn't bother me." Staying put has paid off, landing her the position of David Jones Young Women's Fashion Ambassador in 2011. That her extraordinary looks are a tale in themselves is a given - her father is of German and Scandinavian descent while her mother is Aboriginal, from Kempsey, - it is the about-turn of ancestral fortunes that makes her story so compelling. "She had quite a few problems as she was growing up, it was a different time," Harris says of her mother, a member of the Stolen Generations. "Deep down, I'm sure she reflects back and just thinks, 'Who would have thought I'd have a daughter who would be doing so well, considering the upbringing I had, how I was treated?' I'm sure she's a proud mum." Now all three girls are making their "otherness" work for them. "Brands are looking for something different, looks that are 'Wow'," says Ward. "If it all works, it really doesn't matter what their background is."

Australian fashion veteran Carla Zampatti says her business is a "league of nations", drawing inspiration from across the globe: "I'm blind to any differences in people. When I look at models, I look for elegance and beauty." While there may be a "leftover" stereotype of a tall, blonde Australian model, she says the defining character of Aussie beauty is the "fresh, natural" look, no matter its origin, colour or shape. But the question of ethnicity is a fraught subject, fertile ground for tokenism, racial slights and causing offence. When a hapless Vogue Italia reporter hit the headlines in 2011 by applauding "slave" hoop earrings, then later substituted the word "ethnic", the web was quick to react. And when US Vogue featured an all-Asian shoot in December 2010, naysayers leapt onto its disingenuous definition of "traditional beauty". French Vogue made history in 2011 by putting Chinese model Du Juan on its cover. In January, Vogue Italia featured a Chinese girl, the anachronistically styled Fei Fei Sun, on its cover for the first time, cementing its stance as a cheerleader for diversity in modelling, having hit headlines in 2008 for its "all black" issue. Vogue's celebrity-driven US and UK counter-parts are yet to feature Chinese cover girls. Meanwhile, fashion weeks are a stark forum for quantifying industry diversity - and international runways don't lie. In 2008, 87 per cent of New York Fashion Week's models were white. In January-February 2013, the figure was 82.7 per cent, with 6 per cent black, 9.1 per cent Asian, 2 per cent Latina and 0.2 per cent an unceremonious "other", according to US blog site Jezebel. Just five days after our shoot, Shaik strides the New York runway of Jason Wu, the young American designer steeped in the stellar success of being chosen as Michelle Obama's gown designer for two inaugurations running. While Wu is a firm supporter of Shaik's career, she says, "I have also had the downsides of my look ... It becomes a big issue, it's quite sad at times", and jokes of the "Oreo effect". "You can't have two dark girls next to each other in the shoot, it has to be white girl, dark girl. And we know it - clients laugh at us."

The smile soon fades as she recalls losing out on work at Milan Fashion Week, where she is categorised as a black girl - for want of a more nuanced system - at castings. "Black girls always miss Milan," she says. "They don't get booked there because of how they look. I heard one designer saying, 'No, I don't want any mixed girls. I don't want any dark-skinned girls. I don't want anything.' She just wanted all white girls for her show." As much as modelling today is about celebrating Australia's astonishing variety, it is about cold, hard figures, too. Simply put, if they didn't boost the bottom line of fashion houses, there would be no Gomeses, Harrises and Shaiks. The multicultural mix of such models means they - and others like them in our cities - are potential brand ambassadors in overseas markets. "You are really limiting your marketplace if you only align yourself to one type of consumer," says the Australian Fashion Council's Karen Webster, who has watched as more and more local designers, riding the surge in Australian fashion, have seized the opportunities afforded beyond our borders. China is poised to become the world's second-biggest market for luxury goods by 2017, while India is not far behind, its luxury market growing at a prodigious 25 per cent annually. As it stands, the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) markets swallow 11 per cent - or $US33 billion - of today's luxury labels. It's no accident that style.com, the go-to site for high-end catwalk news, has a Saudi edition or that Diane von Furstenberg, the doyenne of American fashion design, has her largest fan base in China, where her Weibo followers are on a par with her global Twitter followers.

Women are also more likely to buy an item if it is modelled by someone their size, age or skin colour. Canadian professor Ben Barry, a modelling agent by trade, found in his doctoral thesis that brands are better off casting models who mirror the diversity of their target markets than cater to an unreal aspiration - the skinny, pale beanpole. It makes sense, then, that chameleon faces may be best poised to succeed in today's beauty landscape. Shaik's exoticism ("I hear that word a lot," she says) is enigmatic. "People try to guess where I'm from ... I can look half-black, I can look Indonesian, I can look Spanish." It's a gift that opens doors to markets, she says. Harris's lips, Shaik's eyes, Gomes's elegance - yes, it's the aspirational fantasy, but it is a dream that many, many more can now identify with. Back in the studio, there is a sense that our trio, limbs tangled together in front of the lens, are flag-bearers of sorts for a new generation of home-grown models. Says Gomes, "I get Asian girls coming up to me and going, 'I just look up to you so much. I'm so happy you're paving the way' ... It's such an incredible time, taking part in this whole new influx." And, like it or not, the shy Harris has become the poster girl for our indigenous teens. "I have all these girls writing to me," says Harris, who also has 16,000 Instagram followers. "I feel really proud, I'm one of the first indigenous models Australia has ever had. It is who I am."





SAMANTHA HARRIS Age: 22 Lives: Sydney Ethnicity: Aboriginal/German/Scandinavian

Height: 178 centimetres Career highlights: 2010 Vogue Cover; 2011 David Jones Young Women's Fashion Ambassador SHANINA SHAIK Age: 22 Lives: New York

Ethnicity: Pakistani/Saudi/Lithuanian Height: 175 centimetres Career highlights: 2011/12 Victoria's Secret "angel"; New York Fashion Week 2013 JESSICA GOMES Age: 28

Lives: Los Angeles Ethnicity: Singaporean-Chinese/Portuguese Loading Height: 177 centimetres Career highlights: Sports Illustrated magazine swimsuit model; DKNY Jeans campaign