Breakout Style Icon

Lupita Nyong mesmerises award juries with her performance and makes an impact with her stellar red carpet looks.

Lupita Nyong’o

Actor

Say hola to the Kenyan-Mexican actor who has taken Hollywood by storm – Lupita Nyong’o. This stunner rescued us from the fashion purgatory that this awards season has generally been and took us straight to fashion heaven.



Not only did she mesmerise award juries and the global audience with her performance as the downtrodden Patsey in Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave, but also made an impact with her stellar red carpet looks.

She may not have been able to break free from enslavement in the film, but she has inarguably broken the shackles of the age-old notion that beauty equals being light-skinned.

In a short span of time, Lupita has scored a spot among veterans, such as Julia Roberts. She was featured as the industry’s hottest rising star on the cover of Vanity Fair’s 20th annual Hollywood issue. She stood tall (pun intended) and rightly so.

The 30-year-old actor is the perfect blend of beauty and brains. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, Lupita is both eloquent and elegant. She can rock the plains as well as rock the prints. She effortlessly experiments with her looks and doesn’t shy away from trying out different designers.



From the edgy, smokey eye-pink lip look that she sported at the Los Angeles premiere of 12 Years A Slave, to the regality that she exuded in a white and gold Prada gown at the film’s Toronto Film Festival premiere, we can testify that she can pull off any look. For us, she epitomises the classic modern-day woman – confident and fabulous.

She may have won the Breakthrough Performance Award at the 2014 Palm Spring Film Festival, but for us, she is also the breakthrough style icon of the year.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 10^th, 2014.

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