I first saw her in the New York subway: stunningly beautiful, impeccably styled, moving fast through the crowd. Then she appeared in a fashion magazine—a Diesel campaign, her deep eyes and perfect mouth commanding the frame. When her face lit up the screens at Times Square, I recognized her. I knew her story by then.
But there was a crucial difference between those encounters and the last one. In the Times Square ad—a makeup campaign for Olay's Face Anything line—only Jillian Mercado's face was visible. In the subway and the magazine spread, the Dominican-born model appeared with something else: her electric wheelchair.
Since 2010, Mercado has asked photographers to capture her exactly as she is. Today, disabled models walk fashion runways without it being remarkable. Diandra Forrest, Winnie Harlow, Jamie Brewer, Nyle DiMarco—they've all broken through. But ten years ago, when Mercado started, she was alone. She was the first.
Becoming an internationally recognized supermodel is not simply a childhood dream made flesh. It is the journey of someone in love with a world that had rejected her—and determined to overturn it from within.
Mercado grew up in New York, the eldest of three daughters. Her father sold shoes; her mother was a seamstress who brought work home. While other kids watched cartoons, Jillian peppered her mother with questions, watching her hands move. Fashion was the air she breathed.
But becoming a top model was never just a dream. It was something harder: the path of someone in love with a world that had rejected her. She understood perfectly that the dominant standards—Eurocentric, able-bodied—had no room for her. So she decided to enter that world anyway. Not to fit in. To change it.
First, she studied. She earned a degree in marketing from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, then interned at magazines including Allure. She wanted to understand the machinery behind fashion so she could learn to hire "people who looked like me." Starting with herself. In 2013, Diesel signed her. By 2015, she was under contract with IMG, the agency that represents Gigi Hadid and Hailey Bieber.
Editorial shoots. Advertising campaigns. She became the official merchandise model for Beyoncé's album and world tour. In 2018, she became the first disabled model to grace the cover of Teen Vogue. "I hope," she said then, "that underrepresented people see themselves in me." But Mercado had never separated her glamorous work from something fiercer: activism at the intersection of gender and disability. It led her to collaborate with António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General. "We are so much more than the medical labels they give us," she has said. "If disability is part of who we are, we are also astronauts, doctors, lawyers."
Through photographs, interviews, writing, television appearances, acting (she recently joined the cast of the hit series The L Word: Generation Q), videos, and documentaries, Mercado has moved disability to the center of fashion. Her vivid, bold style—a true reflection of her Dominican heritage—has never wavered from calling out what's wrong. Disability should not be a world unto itself. The needs of disabled people must be heard in America. A model like her should not be called beautiful despite her disability. She should be called beautiful, period.
One battle she has fought tirelessly is the right of disabled people to travel. Her custom-built wheelchair—expensive, irreplaceable—has been severely damaged by airport staff more times than she can count. She created the hashtag #DisabledAirlineHorror to document the pattern. "This has to stop," she wrote. "The disrespect and incompetence at airports when handling our assistive devices is unacceptable. These devices are our lives." They take weeks to repair. They cost thousands to replace. And while they're being fixed, the person who needs them is left not only physically but psychologically wounded. Mercado has received hundreds of messages from people so traumatized by these experiences that they've stopped traveling altogether. The statistic is stark: in the United States, 26 wheelchairs are lost or damaged by airlines every single day. "Disabled people are asking for one simple thing," she has said. "To be treated like passengers, not luggage."
It is precisely because of her visibility that Mercado can speak for those who cannot, or whose voices go unheard. She demands the right to work, to learn, to dream, to live fully. She knows change comes slowly—not in one night or one magazine cover. It takes many nights and many covers. But she has made a promise: "As long as I live, I will fight this battle."