Stacy McKenzie on Owning Your Voice, Building Your Brand, and Giving Back

October 10, 2022

The supermodel and walk camp founder opens up about self-acceptance, treating modeling as a business, and why black entrepreneurship starts with knowing who you are.

On a recent episode of The Cocktail Hour with LA Wade, presented by Business Takeout, host Ellie Wade sat down with one of the most recognizable faces in the modeling world — Stacy McKenzie. A veteran of America’s Next Top Model, Canada’s Next Top Model, and Canada’s Drag Race, McKenzie has carved out a career spanning 25 years on the world’s most competitive runways. But behind the portfolio of iconic images is a story of doubt, reinvention, and a quiet, hard-won resolve that has defined everything she has built.

The story behind the red lipstick

Before McKenzie was gracing editorials for the world's top fashion houses, she was a young girl from Jamaica being turned away from modeling agencies, told her lips were too big and her look too unconventional. She tried to change. She altered her appearance, adjusted her presentation, and kept going back — only to be told, again and again, that she was the same girl they didn't want.

"It clicked for me," she said. "You're the same person. You're that different looking girl. So I was like — you know what, this is who I am. I'm going to have to embrace that, accept it, love it, own it, and work with what I got."

That epiphany led her to a mall in Harbour Town Centre, where she walked into a makeup store, asked for the brightest red lipstick they had, and put it on. The gesture was deliberate — a declaration that she was done minimizing her features. "My reason for wearing red lipstick," she explained, "is to say to everybody: these are my big, fat, juicy lips, and I'm going to put the brightest color on them. So you can see them from a mile away."

That lipstick became her signature, and more than that, it became a philosophy. The same energy that allowed her to walk over to Lenny Kravitz mid-runway during a Jean-Paul Gaultier show and kiss him — prompting the legendary designer to tell her the move was "shenyala," brilliant — is the same energy that has kept her relevant across three decades in one of the most fickle industries on the planet.

Modeling versus the modeling business

McKenzie was refreshingly candid about how long it took her to understand the difference between modeling and treating modeling as a business — and how expensive that lesson can be.

"I loved fashion so much, I didn't care about the money," she said. "I just wanted to be on the runway, in front of the camera. I treated it as modeling, not as a business." That changed when a phone call from the IRS arrived at the apartment she shared with a fellow model who had become one of the biggest names in the industry at the time. The bill was $30,000 to $40,000 USD, due within a week. Both of their agents had given them assurances that taxes were being handled. They weren't.

"I learned from that situation," McKenzie said. "I was like — oh hell no. That's not going to be me. I need to treat myself as a business, because I am a business."

From that point forward, her approach shifted. Fashion Week alone might involve ten castings per day. Beyond that, constant client visits, test shoots for fresh portfolio images, and the kind of physical and mental self-maintenance — skin, hair, mental health — that most people outside the industry don't see. "It's a lot of work," she said. "And once I started treating it that way, things changed."

Her advice for anyone building a creative career is the same principle applied more broadly: get your back-end infrastructure right first. The visible, glamorous work — the "pretty stuff," as she put it — can only sustain itself if the business fundamentals are solid behind the scenes.

The secret to 25 years in the industry

When asked what had kept her working for a quarter century, McKenzie's answer had nothing to do with looks or luck. It came down to how she treated people. Every single one of them.

"It's a big industry," she said, "but it's also a small group of people who all know each other." She described encountering, years later, people she had worked with briefly — a makeup artist who had since become an agency head, someone from a minor job who had gone on to run a magazine — all of them reaching back out to book her because of how she had conducted herself in those early interactions. "I've had it happen hundreds of times," she said. "People from 20 years ago calling me up because of how I was on a set in 1997."

Her rule is simple: treat every job as a big job, and every person as a big deal. Not as performance, but because you genuinely do not know who anyone will become — and because the way you behave when no one is watching tends to follow you for the rest of your career.

The Walk Camp and giving back

There is something that animates McKenzie more visibly than any discussion of runways or campaigns: the Walk Camp, her program for young Black girls that she has been running in Canada for seven years and Jamaica for three. She selects 20 to 30 participants per year, and describes them, without hesitation, as her children.
"The most high God put me in the position I'm in — to become this model, this TV personality, this coach — not for me to keep for myself. It's for me to share. With those young Black girls."

She was specific about why the program focuses on Black girls from underserved communities. "I come from those neighborhoods," she said. "I know what it feels like to be one of those young girls in the hood who has dreams and thinks it might not be possible." The Walk Camp exists, in part, to close that gap between a dream and the belief that it is reachable.

McKenzie is currently focused on expanding the program in Jamaica, driven by a conviction that young people in her home country have fewer structural opportunities than those in Canada and need that investment more urgently.

On black wealth, community, and identity

The conversation took a broader turn toward what business and entrepreneurship mean in the context of Black community-building. McKenzie referenced the history of Tulsa's Greenwood District — Black Wall Street — as an example of what collective ownership and economic cooperation can produce, and what can be deliberately dismantled.
"We need to work together," she said. "We need to build with each other. We are not a normal set of people. There's a reason they try to keep us down — it's because of who we really are."

She urged Black entrepreneurs and creators to resist the pull to follow other cultures' trends and instead lean into the depth of their own identity as a competitive advantage. "We don't need to follow anybody else. We need to recognize who we are as a people, and we need to walk with our heads held high."

The one title that matters most

When Wade pressed McKenzie to choose between the labels that define her — Top Model, speaker, coach — she paused for a long moment before landing on speaker.

"When you speak, and people hear your voice, it can touch them in a way that stays with them," she said. Modeling is powerful, but the runway doesn't give you a voice. A photo doesn't let you express what you know or what you feel. Speaking does. "It has more agency," she said. "It's about really connecting with people."
For McKenzie, that connection is the throughline of everything — the reason she went back to that agency one more time, the reason she put on that red lipstick, the reason she shows up every summer to look into the faces of young girls from neighborhoods like the one she came from and tell them: this is possible.

Wade closed the conversation by reading back one of McKenzie's own quotes from her Mercedes-Benz campaign: "Embracing my looks and voice played a major role in my journey to building my self-confidence. Falling in love with fashion took my confidence to the next level. My talents helped shape the woman I am today."
It is, in the end, a business lesson disguised as a personal one. Know what you are. Own what you are. And never let someone else's imagination of you set the ceiling on what you build.

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