Thando Hopa has been on my vision board for years. And, luckily for me and every reader soaking in these pages, she graciously agreed to carry our ‘Breaking Barriers’ issue. There’s no more fitting cover star for such a profound theme.
The cover photoshoot was planned to, dare I say it, perfection. Then, of course, life swooped in and reminded me how laughable that was, and I found myself hospitalised during the days she was set to shoot with our team. The shoot carried on without me and the images produced are stunning (find them in our Fashion section on pages 21).
But as I kept revisiting the gallery, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was missing. I wanted not just to showcase Thando’s striking beauty and enviable fashion sense, but for these pages to act as a vessel for her story – a story that’s woven with lifelong threads of curiosity, bravery, creative energy and unrelenting commitment to self-exploration and collective expansion. Or, as Thando so eloquently puts it, “Media is a way for people to access perspectives that they usually would not have access to. As Africans we are so curious about ourselves, there is aliveness, this rising of consciousness.”