She Named Me
Dipping Dots.

There are teachers and then there are people who change the shape of what you think is possible. Erika White is the second kind. She is a professional model — born and raised right here in Birmingham, Alabama — who had traveled internationally, worked at the highest levels of her craft, and then came back home and decided to share everything she knew with a room full of young women who needed it more than they could articulate. I was one of those young women. And I have never fully said what her presence in my life has meant. This is me trying to do that now.

I met Erika through Antonio Spurling's Designers Loft Studios program — a free after-school space in Downtown Ensley that gave young people from our community access to the fashion industry. A place where we could wear clothes from local designers, learn about the craft, and be seen in a way the industry rarely offered us. Erika was the model mentor. She was the one who walked into that room with the kind of presence that tells you immediately — this woman knows exactly who she is.

She taught us how to walk. And I say that simply, but I mean it fully. Not just the mechanics of putting one foot in front of the other on a runway — but how to move through a room like you belong in it. How to hold your head, how to command attention without demanding it, how to make the clothes speak by getting out of their way. She watched each of us and studied how we moved, and she had a gift for naming exactly what needed to shift.

She named me Dipping Dots.

Because my head bobbled when I walked. I don't remember exactly the first time she said it — I just remember the room laughing and me laughing too, because it was true and it was said with love. It became a correction and a term of endearment at the same time. She had a way of doing that. Of naming the thing that needed work without making you feel like the thing that needed work. I think about Dipping Dots every single time I step onto a runway. That name traveled with me to New York and Atlanta and everywhere in between.

But the runway was only part of what she gave us. Erika took us to her model fittings at Gus Mayer at the Brookwood Mall — the Brookwood that's gone now, that existed in a specific Birmingham that a lot of us carry in our memory like a photograph. She showed us what luxury clothing looked like up close. Not from a distance, not in a magazine — up close, on hangers, in fitting rooms, in the hands of people who understood what made a garment worth something. She understood that young women who had never been in those rooms needed to feel comfortable in them before the industry would let them stay.

She encouraged us to read. She brought books — about the craft, about the industry, about the history of modeling — and she talked to us the way my mother talked to me: know your craft, understand it deeply, don't just do it. She had traveled internationally as a working model and she let those stories breathe into the room without performing them. She wasn't trying to impress us. She was trying to prepare us.

The rules she gave us — and why I still keep them.

What most people heard as campfire stories, I wanted to authentically feel. I wanted to breathe what modeling actually was. And Erika gave us rules that I thought about as wisdom then and have confirmed as wisdom every single year since. I want to write them down here, with her name on them, because they deserve to be preserved.

I am not exaggerating when I say these ten rules have functioned as a professional code of conduct for my entire career. They kept me safe in rooms that weren't always safe. They kept me clear-headed on nights when the pressure to be something else was real. Rule five alone — I want to say this plainly — has protected me more times than I can count, in an industry that has a long and documented history of not protecting its models. Erika said it as a matter of fact. As something we should know the way we know our own names.

"What most people heard as campfire stories and industry tales — I wanted to authentically feel. I wanted to breathe what modeling actually was. And Erika let me."

The Apparel Mart, the WOW shows, and my first thousand dollars.

Erika introduced us to something called showroom modeling — a side of the industry most of us hadn't encountered. She encouraged us to audition with the Atlanta Apparel Mart to work the WOW Prom shows, and I was booked. I remember the feeling of getting that call. I remember my feet hating me before it was over. Those shows were long, the work was relentless, but I did it for several years — and through it, Erika began to teach me about the finances of modeling. How the pay worked. How the agency system worked. What your rate meant and how to protect it. She was giving us a business education wrapped inside a fashion education and most of us didn't even realize it at the time.

I made my first one thousand dollars in a day from those shows. I remember staring at that number and feeling like something had shifted. Like I understood for the first time that this was a real career with real earning potential — not a dream you chased and hoped landed. Erika had made it tangible.

The day she took us to meet Cynthia Bailey.

Erika also took me and a few other models to the open call for Cynthia Bailey's Model Search at the Birmingham Jefferson Convention Complex. We stood in line for hours — over 250 people had turned out that day — and Erika stood with us. Not as a handler or a chaperone. As someone who believed the experience itself was worth the wait and wanted to make sure we were there to receive it.

I became a finalist. My name is in that Birmingham News article — Finn Jasele, 23, of Forestdale — alongside three other women selected from the hundreds who showed up. I made it to the final competition. I did not win. But I stood in a room with Cynthia Bailey, I walked a runway that was covered by the press, and I carried myself the way Erika had taught me to carry myself. I think about that day often. Not as a near miss — but as evidence that the preparation had worked.

We would visit Erika's house sometimes. She would cook dinner. We would go through her closet — all these beautiful clothes, her model books full of years of work — and it was genuinely exciting just to be near that history. To see what a career in fashion looked like accumulated into a life. She never made it feel like showing off. It felt like showing us what was possible. Like a woman opening a door and saying: look at what is on the other side of the work.

What I want her to know — what I should have said sooner.

Erika still models with me now. We walk together in the Maranathan Academy Fashion Shows — she's part of that world too, connected to the Ebony Fashion Fair models, part of the fabric that makes those shows feel like something more than just fashion. Walking alongside her on a runway is a different feeling than walking alongside anyone else. She knows what she taught me, but I don't know if she knows how deeply I received it.

So let me say it here, with my name on it, for as long as this page exists: Erika White changed the direction of my life. Not by telling me I was talented — plenty of people do that. But by giving me structure. By teaching me that talent without discipline is a wish, and that a woman who knows her worth and knows her rules can walk into any room and walk out with her dignity intact. She gave me those rules when I was young enough to build my career on top of them. And I have. Every single day, I have.

Thank you, Erika. Thank you to her family for sharing her with us during those years at Designers Loft Studios. She was not just a mentor — she was proof that Birmingham has always had women worth learning from. We just have to be willing to show up and listen.