Xueli Abbing, from orphanage to Vogue's pages

A photograph taken in a Chinese orphanage in 2001 shows a newborn girl with white hair and pale skin. Her parents had left her there days after her birth. Her name, given to her later, is Xueli Abbing.

Abbing was born in Fujian Province, China, with albinism — a condition that, according to the BBC, her birth parents may have seen as an ill omen in a cultural context where albinism carries deep stigma. She was adopted by a Dutch family and grew up in the Netherlands, where she began modelling in her teens.

The BBC reported that Abbing signed with Chanel at sixteen and has since appeared in campaigns across Europe. She has been featured in Vogue Netherlands, becoming one of the few models with albinism to reach that platform in the mainstream fashion industry.

Abbing has spoken openly about the dual identity she carries: Chinese by birth, Dutch by upbringing, and visually distinct in both worlds. The BBC quoted her reflecting on the isolation of not quite belonging to any single community — a feeling many people with albinism recognise across different geographies and cultures.

Advocacy alongside modelling

Abbing has worked with UNICEF on campaigns addressing the treatment of children with albinism in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where ritual attacks targeting people with albinism remain a documented and ongoing harm. The BBC noted that she has used her visibility deliberately, choosing partnerships that connect her platform to the wider albinism community rather than treating her appearance as a novelty.

She has described the fashion industry's interest in her as complicated. The BBC reported that she distinguishes between work that treats her albinism as a costume or aesthetic device and work that engages with her as a whole person. That distinction, she has said, shapes which projects she accepts.

Abbing has also spoken about the practical realities of living with albinism: significant visual impairment, the need for consistent sun protection, and the difficulty of navigating spaces — from school corridors to casting rooms — designed without her needs in mind. The BBC did not specify the extent of her visual impairment, but low vision is a common and often underacknowledged aspect of albinism across all forms of the condition.

Her story, as the BBC framed it, is one of early abandonment followed by international visibility. Abbing herself has been careful, in interviews cited by the BBC, not to let that arc be read as a simple redemption narrative. The orphanage, the adoption, the modelling contract — she holds these as facts of her life, not a sequence that proves anything about resilience or fate.

What she has said she wants, according to the BBC, is for children with albinism born today — in China, in Tanzania, in the Netherlands — to grow up without the particular loneliness she experienced. That is a smaller, more precise wish than inspiration. It is the kind that stays with you.