Adwoa Aboah is one of the most significant and visible faces in fashion today. She’s walked in 15 shows during the Autumn/Winter 2018 season alone, has recently fronted campaigns from high-street to high-end (from GAP to Versus Versace), and appears on magazine covers worldwide. Perhaps because it’s not just her face, but also her voice that resonates. With refreshing candour, she has talked openly about her struggles with depression, drugs and a 2015 suicide attempt, and channelled her experiences into her online community Gurls Talk to encourage young women to open up.

Adwoa grew up close to fashion. Her mother is photographic agent Camilla Lowther, whose creative agency CLM represents high-profile stylists and photographers such as Katie Grand and Juergen Teller. Her father Charles Aboah owns both a location-scouting company and CiMS, a technology company. While her artist sister Kesewa is now also a model, and one of the current faces of Miu Miu.

As well as being represented by CLM, Juergen Teller has been a family friend of the Aboah’s for many years. Which made him the perfect person to capture an intimate and tender portrait — in both images and words — of this modern family. So System asked him to pay a visit to the Aboahs’ home in West London, to take some family pictures and have a chat. The results are as candid as the participants, the kind of refreshing honesty that’s engaging a new generation of fashion fans and the industry to talk about more than just clothes and catwalks.

Camilla Aboah:
We were laughing in the car with Adwoa, because Adwoa’s friend, who has a house on Golborne Road, rented his house out on Airbnb. The person who rented it was a foreigner who thought it would be a cool place to live in temporarily. The guy had a really fancy car and his wing mirror ended up getting smashed so many times that he eventually moved out. Everywhere around this part of town is so kind of ‘bijoux’ these days, that it’s quite nice to know that it can still be a bit rough.

Adwoa Aboah:
I love that.

Camilla:
It actually makes me happy to hear that. Like, thank God. So Juergen, what are you shooting for the next Vivienne Westwood campaign?

Juergen Teller:
We’re going to have these transgender people.

Camilla:
Shooting in New York?

Juergen:
Yes.

Camilla:
And Burberry is the following week. Christopher Bailey won’t tell anybody what the shoot is, except you, Juergen. He won’t even tell his staff.

Juergen:
What the hell is it that makes it so secretive? Is it the Queen wearing Burberry?

Camilla:
Maybe he wants you to photograph him naked or something.

Charles:
Maybe it’s Donald Trump in Burberry!

Adwoa:
What transgender people are you using for Westwood?

Juergen:
You weren’t there at my exhibition at the Vivienne Westwood showroom in New York, right, Adwoa?

Adwoa:
No, I wasn’t.

Juergen:
There was my exhibition, and then they had all these transgender people walking on all these different floors in their Vivienne Westwood outfits.

Camilla:
Were they completed trans-ed?

Adwoa:
Somewhere in between, I don’t know exactly.

Charles:
You’re not really allowed to say he or she.

Adwoa:
No, you have to ask what they would like to be known as. In schools, they now ask you what pronoun you are – he, she, they…

Camilla:
They’ve got a transgender person in school. And I said, ‘Wow, that’s amazing! We didn’t even have a single Jewish person in our class, let alone anything else. It was so boringly white, Anglo-Saxon Catholic.

Adwoa:
Isn’t that cool though? Juergen, have you ever photographed Teddy Quinlivan?

Juergen:
No, I haven’t. I think she maybe came for a fitting once though.

Adwoa:
She’s lovely, you should use her, she just came out as transgender.

Charles:
…and she did the Gurls Talk event, too.

Adwoa:
No, that was Hanne Gabe. Hanne’s not transgender, she’s inter-sex.

Juergen:
What’s that?

Charles:
She’s what used to be referred to as hermaphrodite.

Adwoa:
Teddy does the Louis Vuitton show; I’m sure you know her. She’s transgender. She’s just great.

Juergen:
Well, at my exhibition in New York, I found all the transgender people extremely charming and cute and sweet. Really quite something. And I thought, ‘Wow, we should use them for the campaign’.

Adwoa:
That’s a great idea.

Juergen:
And they were gorgeous too, and intriguing, and really engaging.

Adwoa:
Will Vivienne Westwood travel to New York for the campaign shoot?

Juergen:
Yes. She is almost always on the shoot.

Charles:
She’s sweet, isn’t she?

Camilla:
She’s opinionated. She’s got lots to say.

Charles:
Andreas is very nice, too.

Adwoa:
He is so nice.

Charles:
I didn’t realize that he’s the main designer at Westwood now.

Juergen:
That’s right. Andreas is brilliant. So listen, do you want to see the pictures we did together in the summer, the ones that will go with this interview?

Adwoa:
Yeah, yeah.

Juergen:
But there’s no veto, OK?

Charles:
[laughs] I love that, laying down the rules. We’ll just have to take the rough with the smooth.

Adwoa:
I only told you to do one thing, which was Photoshop that spot out of my face…

Juergen:
That’s fine.

Adwoa:
That’s all I ask. I don’t want there to be a spot.

Juergen:
[laughs] Or I’ll just add another one in retouching!

Adwoa:
Yes, you’ll end up giving me acne on my face.

Juergen:
So, it is in no particular order, OK? [Begins showing the pictures]

Adwoa:
That’s so nice!

Charles:
It was a good day, wasn’t it? We drank a lot of rosé. [Looking at pictures] This was obviously shot at the end of the day. You’d gone to bed by then, Adwoa.

Adwoa:
[Looking at another picture] Oh, it’s Kesewa babe!

Juergen:
So sweet, right?

Adwoa:
Love that. Ah, Mama, you look lovely in this one.

Charles:
Yes, that is a very nice one of you, Camilla.

Juergen:
Isn’t it.

Adwoa:
[Looking at another picture] I love this one of us all together.

Camilla:
Juergen wanted that on the cover, but System wouldn’t do it because you were smoking.

Adwoa:
Why can’t you put that on the cover? It’s so funny. It’ll make a nice Christmas card though! [Looking at another picture] My eyes are rolling back in this one.

Charles:
Were you that tired?

Camilla:
You’d been to a party the night before, hadn’t you?

Charles:
Wow! Look at Camilla’s eyes in this one, that’s really lovely.

Adwoa:
You’ve captured all of us so well, Juergen. And that is really us… annoyingly.

Camilla:
You know when you get those Vanity Fair or American Vogue shoots where the family is together in their lovely garden. Well, this is the real version of that.

Juergen:
So, Adwoa, there have been so many articles about you recently. And you just did something with Tim Blanks, which came out today.

Adwoa:
Yeah, yeah.

Juergen:
So I thought, what do I ask you? I don’t even know where to start or whether I can add anything to what you said already.

Camilla:
Just ask us normal questions.

Charles:
Tim’s article was very good – very well written – did you read it?

Juergen:
I just started reading it. I recently photographed Tim for System. [Shows the pictures]

Adwoa:
That is hysterical. Whose dog is that?

Juergen:
It’s Tim’s dog, licking his hairy legs.

Charles:
I didn’t realize he was so muscular.

Adwoa:
I never knew he was so hairy.

Juergen:
He is such a sweet guy.

Camilla:
Juergen, for this interview you don’t really have to add anything about Gurls Talk.

Juergen:
Yes, I totally agree. Because it’s already been written about so much. In a way, this piece is more about the pleasure for me of having known you for something like 28 years. And the fact that we all live in the same area, and it’s such a lovely thing to see a family with two kids doing all this stuff…

Camilla:
…and none of us have changed.

Juergen:
So, what do you like doing as a family?

Camilla:
We like watching television. We’re all telly addicts.

Adwoa:
Gomorrah.

Charles:
Oh God, Gomorrah was amazing, I loved it. When we went to Positano, I said to the guy we were with, ‘Tell me, you and your family run a boat business, you have all these restaurants and everything… is there an influence of the Mafia here, like in Gomorrah?’ And he said: ‘Basically, this whole area is their playground. So, nothing untoward goes on here, you know what I mean. They keep it very safe.’

Juergen:
What else are you watching on television at the moment?

Charles:
We’re watching Queen of the South. It’s on Netflix.

Adwoa:
I started watching Ozark.

Juergen:
Ozark is fucking brilliant!

Adwoa:
Yeah, so good.

Charles:
I finished Ozark.

Juergen:
I watched it in Hydra. Three days, whole thing done.

Camilla:
TV has always been the way that all of us relax.

Juergen:
I grew up on TV in the German countryside.

Camilla:
Yes, me too, over here. Especially in winter.

Juergen:
And when I was a teenager, it was cinema.

Camilla:
Me, too.

Juergen:
I had no culture around me whatsoever. Just trees.

Camilla:
Everything I learned was from films.

Charles:
That’s where Camilla learned her first swear word.

Camilla:
No, I learned that from my parents!

Juergen:
Charles, how did you and Camilla meet?

Charles:
I used to work in London when I was a youth at this place in Knightsbridge called the Chicago Rib Shack. This one girl I worked with called Charlotte was, unbeknownst to me, a very good friend of Camilla’s.

Adwoa:
What were you doing there, Dadda?

Charles:
I was a chef and Charlotte was a waitress. Her now-husband John used to work there, too. We called him John the Barman because he was the barman. John and Charlotte married and then Mummy and I got married. Anyway, one day Charlotte said to me, ‘Oh, you’ve got to meet my friend Camilla; she’s doing this Berkeley Square ball, but there aren’t any men there. So, I said, ‘OK. I’ll go and meet her.’ Well, I obviously never went, and each time Charlotte saw me she was like, ‘Did you meet Camilla yet?’ I finally went, and took a friend along with me. Camilla was standing there, with bright red hair, and a yellow jacket, remember?

Camilla:
Mmm.

Charles:
She was standing at the end of the kitchen, and she wouldn’t look me in the eye! One thing led to another, we finished a conversation, and as we went out, my friend said to me, ‘She’s very weird, isn’t she? Did you notice how she didn’t look at us?’

Juergen:
[laughs]

Charles:
Anyway, off we went, and then we did the Berkeley Square ball together and we became friends and…

Camilla:
He’s such a liar! Basically, he missed the night bus.

Charles:
No, I didn’t!

Camilla:
Yes, you did!

Charles:
You asked me to stay, you keep telling that version of the story to please yourself.

Camilla:
We did the Berkeley Square Ball; it was the night they sank the Belgrano during the Falklands War. Remember?

Charles:
All the men that she knew at the time were basically junkies. And couldn’t get it together.

Camilla:
And white. I didn’t have any black mates then.

Charles:
We behaved really badly at the Berkeley Square Ball.

Camilla:
Really badly.

Charles:
Because the stupid idiots gave us two cases of Champagne.

Camilla:
Vidal Sassoon was the compère, and he was wearing a shirt that had VS sewn into it. And my friend Charlotte asked him, ‘What does that stand for?’ and he replied, ‘Very Sexy’, and she went, ‘Very Slimy more like’.

Charles:
I remember Norman Parkinson was there that night.

Camilla:
That was a long time ago.

Charles:
A long time. How old were you?

Camilla:
21 or 22.

Juergen:
Where did you grow up Charles?

Charles:
I was born in Ghana. My father was a diplomat so part of my childhood was in Cairo. He was posted there and then we grew up here in London as well. My teenage years were here, and I’ve stayed ever since. I still go back to Ghana; I’m going back soon to see my mother.

Juergen:
We should go one day.

Charles:
You would have a ball! I mean it. It’s like a photo set everywhere you go.

Adwoa:
It’s so nice in here, Juergen; you’ve got the best studio.

Juergen:
I’ve got a sauna upstairs.

Adwoa:
Do you?

Camilla:
Do you guys all get in the sauna together?

Charles:
That’s very German. I prefer steam.

Camilla:
I like walking. I wouldn’t do running, I hate running.

Juergen:
Walking is great.

Camilla:
Ed [Juergen and Sadie Cole’s son] is just so adorable: you can see that he is just at that tipping point of becoming a teenager. He’s got a little moustache.

Adwoa:
Does he?

Camilla:
It’s tiny, like dust.

Juergen:
I’d been away for a week and I was sitting with Ed having breakfast – he was wearing his hoodie up over his face, eating cornflakes – and I was looking at him, and suddenly said, ‘Oh my God, Ed! Look, you’ve got a moustache growing!’ And he just goes, ‘Yeah Dad, deal with it. You’re losing your hair, and I’m arriving!’

Charles:
[laughs]

Juergen:
I was speechless.

Camilla:
Has he got a bit smelly?

Juergen:
Yes, especially when he’s done hours and hours of skateboarding.

Camilla:
Young men stink, don’t they?

Juergen:
Yes, and they’re totally oblivious to it. Just recently we were in Sadie’s tiny car, and we picked Ed up from skateboarding. I was sitting in the front seat, and he came and hung all over me, and I was like, ‘Eugh! Get off me!’

Camilla:
I agree. You have to tell them they smell. They have to learn to wash. They don’t wash enough. And they go monosyllabic on you as well, teenage boys do. They just kind of grunt.

Juergen:
Not yet.

Camilla:
Sadie said he switches from being cuddly to grunting.

Juergen:
That and the toilet-seat action. It starts going everywhere.

Adwoa:
I couldn’t live with that. We had our cousins over and they are so stinky.

Charles:
Shall we get Kesewa on FaceTime?

Charles:
[On FaceTime to Kesewa] …so we’re just looking at all the pictures Juergen took of us this summer. You want to have a look?

Kesewa:
Yes! Hi Juergen!

Juergen:
Hi, how are you?

Kesewa:
Good thank you, how are you?

Juergen:
Great. You in New York?

Kesewa:
Yes, in New York. I’m walking to your house, Adwoa.

Adwoa:
Cool, what else are you doing?

Kesewa:
Just been to the gym.

Camilla:
How are you?

Kesewa:
I’m really good. I’m going to watch It tonight.

Charles:
Oh, that is really scary.

Camilla:
It is really scary. Have you read the book? I hate clowns.

Juergen:
That’s what Ed said. Look at these pictures Kesewa [show pictures via FaceTime]

Kesewa:
They are so cool. Is that Adwoa sleeping?

Adwoa:
Yeah.

Kesewa:
Oh, let me see that one closer. Pull the phone closer. Oh, Mamma! That is so nice of you; you look so happy.

Camilla:
I know. For once.

Kesewa:
God, why am I pulling that weird face? You can definitely tell I was hungover in some of the photos.

Charles:
Well, we did have about six bottles of rosé, remember?

Kesewa:
Yes, but I’d also only been to bed for a few hours the night before.

Camilla:
Where had you been? You and Adwoa had both been out.

Adwoa:
Cherry’s. Cherry’s. Cherry’s.

Kesewa:
I’d been out clubbing in East London. They are so nice, Juergen. You’re a bloody good photographer, aren’t you! [Everyone laughs] You should do it for a living! They are so fucking cool. Oh, I love my family! Love you for taking all these photos, they are so sweet.

Adwoa:
How’s it going in New York, Kesewa?

Kesewa:
It’s good. I’ve been having these really lucid dreams recently and then later on being a bit more awake and realizing they’re not actually real. Yesterday, I fell asleep on your sofa for two hours, and I had a dream that I found your iPhone inside the sofa, like you had ripped open the upholstery and put it inside. I woke up and I literally wrote the text to you saying, ‘I’ve found your phone inside the upholstery on the sofa’, then suddenly realized that the upholstery was still closed and that it had all been a dream. It was so fucking weird!

[Everyone laughs]

I’ve just come from the gym. The personal trainer woman is so annoying! She is so fucking happy all the time, it actually makes me angry.

Charles:
Oh, I can’t bear that.

Kesewa:
When you’re burning with pain and she’s like, ‘Oh my God, just push it girl, you’re doing so well, I really believe in you!’ And I’m like, ‘God, I am so going to punch you in the face!’

Juergen:
Kesewa, could you tell me a story about Adwoa?

Kesewa:
About Adwoa? God yeah, I’ve got loads. Erm, OK, she once got us kicked out of this ping-pong club.

Juergen:
A ping-pong club?

Kesewa:
Yes, they play lots of music and then you play ping-pong. It was very fucking strange. And it was full of American hoorays in button-down shirts and like, what do you call those beige trousers?

Adwoa:
Chinos.

Kesewa:
Yeah, chinos. It was just very Hooray Henry. So, we were playing ping-pong and Adwoa got bored so she jumped on top of the table and started dancing and throwing her ping-pong bat in the air. The bouncer came, took her down off the table and chucked us out. Then suddenly, as I’m following her out, Adwoa suddenly dashed passed us and climbed back onto the table and started gyrating, and then gets kicked out again. That was fucking funny.

Charles:
What about the time I got kicked out of a club.

Kesewa:
Oh yes! Daddy got kicked out of a club because the line was too long for the bathroom so he started peeing in the garden. It was so humiliating! I took him out with all my friends, then saw him getting thrown out by the bouncers. I was like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

Adwoa:
You took Dadda to a club?

Kesewa:
I took him to a club with about 15 girls! I have the funniest photo of him and my friend Indigo so drunk; Indigo on his back doing the lasso move. Then I’ve got a photo of him with all these girls on a table – he looks like Don Corleone.

Camilla:
Talking of getting busted for peeing, do you remember when Georg, who used to work with Juergen, got a writ for peeing? He was in New York somewhere – it was the middle of the night and he was a bit pissed – and he was so desperate for the loo that he peed in a bush and got stopped by the police. He got a writ and a summons.

Kesewa:
Really? Wow.

Adwoa:
Doing this interview has reminded me that people always say Kesewa and I sound the same. Remember when I always used to get you to call people and pretend to be me.

Kesewa:
I used to answer all Adwoa’s calls, too, pretending to be her. But it got a bit weird the other day because I was like, ‘Hello!’ – and I did the whole Adwoa voice – but it was someone she was seeing, so it was actually a bit strange. Do you remember that night we walked back…

Adwoa:
…from Brooklyn.

Kesewa:
That was so nice! I was also thinking about that night when we danced the whole way home from New York.

Charles:
Have you got a story about Mamma?

Kesewa:
Yes. On Sundays, when we were younger, Mamma used to come in and check our sports bags and stuff to make sure we had everything for the next school week. As per usual, I’d probably lost half of my sports kit and my uniform, so that would always piss her off. Anyway, every single Sunday, like clockwork, she’d walk in and there was this chair that she’d stub her toe on…

Charles:
[Laughs].

Kesewa:
She would be in the worst fucking mood you have ever seen. But it was so funny.

Charles:
Adwoa, have you got a story about Kesewa?

Adwoa:
I can think of loads of things. It almost always entails lots of dancing, doesn’t it?

Kesewa:
Well, there is a better story, if I’m allowed to tell it?

Adwoa:
Which one?

Kesewa:
The one in New Mexico?

Adwoa:
Oh my God, yeah, why not.

Kesewa:
That is the best story we’ve got.

Camilla:
Juergen will love that story.

Adwoa:
Let me tell it. So, after I’d come out of rehab, we had gone on holiday to save our relationship.

Juergen:
Whose relationship?

Adwoa:
Me and Kesewa. It was a make-or-break holiday to save our relationship! [Laughs]

Kesewa:
A family road trip to New Orleans.

Charles:
Well, we started off in LA and went to Las Vegas, remember? We won loads of money.

Kesewa:
We did gambling as a family in Las Vegas. Our first ever time and we each won over a grand!

Adwoa:
Then we went to Sedona and I got into a fight with the woman who worked in the supermarket…

Kesewa:
No wait, that was Santa Fe.

Adwoa:
Oh yes. I got into a fight with the woman who ran the organic supermarket and Kesewa was humiliated by my behaviour. So then we were driving –
in total silence! – to Carlsbad, in New Mexico, to see the caverns. I was trying to make up with her, but since there was unfinished business it was all pretty tense. Then we went to bed – still in silence – and woke up the following day.

Kesewa:
That is bullshit! We had already made up by that point and I went to get pasta for us to eat, sorted out the hotel, the dog was with us…

Adwoa:
No, it was still tense between us. We woke up the following morning…

Kesewa:
I went downstairs and had a coffee. I’m quite grumpy in the mornings at the best of times, and after all the driving we’d been doing, I was really grumpy. Now this is probably the point where we differ on what happened, but you start…

Adwoa:
No, no, you carry on Kesewa.

Kesewa:
When I went downstairs for a coffee, I felt as if Adwoa was trying to pick a fight with me. I just said to her, ‘Leave me alone’, and went outside to the car, where I started being a bit of single-tear crying on the bonnet of the car. Then Adwoa comes over and says, ‘If you’re going to fucking cry about it why don’t you just go home?’ So then I was like, ‘Well, maybe I will go home’. And she said, ‘Oh fucking hell you are so pathetic!’ At that point, we were stood either side of the car, hurling abuse at each other. Then Adwoa starts walking around the car, towards me…

Adwoa:
…slowly approaching each other.

Kesewa:
And we just kind of collided! For about half a minute, we started punching each other in the face. Glasses got smashed, earrings got smashed.

Juergen:
Really? Wow.

Kesewa:
Adwoa dragged me around by my hair, it was all coming out! About half way through, while on the floor, I got a glimpse of the facade of the hotel; there is only one window at the bottom of it, and there were all these faces just staring out at us two, scrapping in the parking lot.

Adwoa:
All these families that were on holiday, just looking over at us.

Kesewa:
So we had our quick fight: a couple of punches, kicking, screaming, you know what it’s like. Then, just as we’re breaking apart, four policemen start running towards us. Two took me away and two took Adwoa away. They were asking us, ‘Why were you fighting?’ And I was like, ‘Because she’s my bitch sister and I hate her!’

Adwoa:
And I was like, ‘Yeah and I fucking hate her, too!’

Kesewa:
They asked for our visas and all our ID and documentation; I had all my school ID with me. The police were like, ‘Look, we’re not going to take you in, but you really can’t be fighting like that in the middle of a parking lot!’ Then, as I get back into our car, and Adwoa’s lighting up a cigarette, four police-cruisers suddenly rock up with two policemen in each of them!

Adwoa:
They’d basically called for fucking back-up because they were so panicked about these two black girls having a fight in a parking lot in this tiny butt-fuck-of-nowhere town. [Laughs]

Kesewa:
But we’ve got loads of nice stories, too, like in Mexico, where we literally danced the whole time.

Adwoa:
We were always dancing.

Juergen:
Kesewa, you are older than Adwoa, right?

Kesewa:
No, Adwoa is older. There have been other moments when the two of us are just eating or in a cab, and being very chilled and relaxed in each other’s company; we’ll just be talking about mummy, daddy, the family, or our friends, and we’ll get the giggles and cannot stop laughing.

Juergen:
That’s sounds wonderful.

Kesewa:
Also, Adwoa has fantastic clothes. So, my favourite thing is, when I’m in a panic about getting dressed to go out for something, Adwoa will always take me into her room and will do the whole outfit for me so I look really nice. That’s always really nice of her…She’s the best!

Camilla:
You are best friends now.

Kesewa:
We’ve always been best friends; we just had a break.

Juergen:
That’s normal.

Charles:
I love the four police cars. You’re lucky you weren’t Tasered.

Adwoa:
I know!

Kesewa:
But we were still best friends when we were having time apart.

Juergen:
Thank you, Kesewa.

Kesewa:
Love you all so much! Have a good day.

Charles:
Love you, darling.

Juergen:
I think that was brilliant.

Charles:
Thanks, Juergen, that was really good fun.

Adwoa:
Thanks, Juergen. Bye, babes.