Jacqueline Murdock

Murdock started dancing at the Apollo theater in New York when she was 17 (her dance name is “Tajah”). She says she wanted to model “from a very young age,” but, “The opportunity was not there at my time for women of color.”

The people at Lanvin noticed Murdock after she went on the Today show to talk about Advanced Style with some of the blog’s other sassy star subjects. Murdock tells Fashionista she went in for an interview with the label and received a call the next day that she had been cast for the campaign, which features “real people” aged 18 to 82.

In her interview with Fashionista, Murdock reveals herself to be one of the few women who rejoice when they don’t fit into a size zero:

Well at first, they brought a short dress–strapless with a big great white bow. I looked at it and thought it would have been more appropriate for a younger woman–a 19 or 20-year-old girl. The two ladies that were helping me step into it said ‘This is too small. We can’t pull up the zipper.’ It must have been a size zero, and I was so happy. Then they brought the original dress, and it was just me. It had a neck. The green long sleeves, skirt below the knee, with a peplum in the front. It’s so unusual because I spoke to them when they interviewed me about a peplum, and I didn’t event know that a peplum was in this year!

Here is the clip of Murdock on the Today show, which affectionately dubs her and her Advanced Style compatriots “glam-mas”: