GQ. Even Vogue, which had rejected her earlier, gave her spreads and, in 2017, conferred her the Model of the Year award. Girl power In 2016, Sunil partnered with her friend Jill Ulrich McElya on the nonprofit, Invisible Girl Project. “We have 450 girls, all of whom were essentially abandoned by their families because in India it’s very hard for people from lower economic backgrounds to take on the financial obligations of having a girl child,” she explains. “We fundraise [in the US] and we partner with on-ground facilities in India, to provide extra infrastructure for whatever they don’t have — for instance, access to schools or medication.” They also monitor what is going on in and around the villages [in Chennai and Delhi, where they are based] to ‘rescue vulnerable babies and girls from being killed or trafficked’. “In 2020 we were selected to present at the UN CSW [United Nations Commission on the Status of Women] because we’re doing a lot of work around infrastructure for women in India, but the pandemic changed some of those plans,” says Sunil, who also produced a film on the subject last year.