It was a high cheekbone extravaganza when beauty guru and influencer Jackie Aina joined Naomi Campbell on the season finale of her daily YouTube livestream No Filter with Naomi. The two of course talked all things beauty, praised Pat McGrath, and even put on their makeup together for the D-Nice’s Friday night Instagram Live party.
But one of the most exciting parts of the conversation was when Naomi dropped some juicy news on the big YouTube star.
“Do you know that you were getting a very special invitation this year?” Naomi teased. “Do you know that Mr. Derek Blasberg was inviting you to the Met Ball to the table to sit with him?”
Aina seemed to have had some sort of inkling, but Naomi’s news confirmed it. And besides sigh in frustration since this year’s gala has been postponed indefinitely, all she could do was enjoy simply knowing that she made the list.
“I’m shook,” she said as Naomi took pleasure in being the one to deliver the news that her presence was requested at the luxurious affair.
If you’re shrugging your shoulders at all the hype, then you clearly don’t understand the difficulty in getting invited to the Met gala. The president of the United States couldn’t even finagle an invite to the coveted fashion event. The attendees list is just that exclusive. One supermodel said that she was uninvited one year because her husband violated Anna Wintour’s personal space by giving her a hug.
So for someone who’s built her empire from a career path that didn’t exist just a decade ago, it’s quite an accomplishment.
During the conversation, Naomi also broke the news that Aina is on the cover of The Knot’s summer 2020 issue. For Aina, who recently got engaged but says planning is at a halt due to COVID-19, it’s an honor to be the first influencer to grace the cover of the quarterly bridal magazine. It wasn’t lost on the two queens either that she also joined a short list of Black women who had done the same.
“A lot of these bridal pages don’t respost Black brides. They don’t switch up and diversify,” said Aina, who’s known for speaking out against the lack of representation in the fashion and beauty industries.
“And when The Knot reached out they were saying ‘we are trying to contribute to more diversity in the bridal industry and switch things up,'” she finished. “And I love that because everybody wants to see themselves represented everywhere, not just in beauty but in bridal, in media, film, television. Because if they don’t see someone else doing it then they’re not going to think it’s possible for themselves.”