When Halima Aden was six, a western woman visited Kakuma, the United Nations refugee camp in Kenya in which she had been born. To this day, Aden — who was living in the camp with her Somali mother and baby brother — does not know who she was. A UN representative perhaps? Or a celebrity?

“All I know is that, just by being there, she made my people light up,” explains Aden when we meet in a café in east London: she is in town to take part in the Modest Fashion Festival, an event aimed at empowering Muslim women. “She was asking them questions, finding out what they needed, making them feel like they hadn’t been forgotten. Seeing the effect that she had changed something in me; it made me want to make some sort of a difference with my life. To have that sort of effect.”

Today, the 20-year-old model — a naturalised American since the family made the move to Minnesota when she was seven years old — is making history. In November 2016, as a freshman at St Cloud State University, she entered in the Miss Minnesota USA beauty pageant, for which she wore a hijab and then a burkini, attracting the attention of the world’s press in the process. Although she placed in the top 15 of 45 contestants, she lost — but she went on to become the first hijab-wearing model to be signed to the model agency IMG.