HOMECOMING

ANOK YAI returns to HOWARD UNIVERSITY, where she was discovered as a model. It's a sacred space that CAPTURES the best of the AMERICAN SPIRIT and the RELENTLESS DRIVE toward FREEDOM.

- Kaitlyn Greenidge

It was like a scene out of a movie. Yashua Simmons, the stylist for this shoot, was a senior in high school when he visited the Howard University campus in Washington, D.C., with his mother in the early 2000s. "There was a Black girl, short hair. She reminded me of my sister," he says. "She ran across the street. She had on this little denim pencil skirt and a white T-shirt, and as she ran across the street, I saw that on the back of her skirt, it said D&G on the pocket. I turned to my mom and I said, I'm going here." Simmons laughs as he recalls the story. "It sounds superficial." But it isn't.

Not really. The young woman Simmons saw was a vision of his future in fashion. The freedom of her movement, the boldness of her style, was an avatar for what Howard is for so many: a place of possibility and wild, shocking beauty.

Two decades later, Simmons, struck by the wave of protests and student unrest sweeping the country in the spring of 2024, envisioned honoring and celebrating these students "on the front lines" at his alma mater during its legendary homecoming festivities, which last year celebrated their centennial.

The pieces began to click into place: Anok Yai, whose career was launched after a photo of her attending Howard homecoming in 2017 went viral, had to be the model. "It's a homecoming for her," Simmons says.