Fashion models share off-runway tales

They’re the often-anonymous stars of New York Fashion Week — the models who walk the runways in designer clothes, looking mostly impassive and inevitably beautiful as they pose before cameras.

Their lives off the runways, however, remain for the most part a mystery.

They are young women such as Mari Agory, whose family fled the South Sudan for Egypt to escape civil war; Adesuwa Pariyapasat, who was discovered by a scout in Nigeria at 17; Abiah Hostvedt, whose life on the road sometimes makes him homesick for his native Jamaica.

AP photographers spoke backstage with models during New York Fashion Week. Here are their stories.