For Abdi, this show — her first professional runway gig — is indeed a fantasy made real. Just a few months earlier, she was working a checkout lane at Target after graduating high school in Des Moines ...

Ugbad Abdi is next. Finally. Her nerves are swollen like shaken carbonation behind a jammed cork. For 20 minutes, she’s watched from the back of this long line as the women at the front disappear ...

Just a few months earlier, she was working a checkout lane at Target after graduating high school in Des Moines, Iowa, thousands of miles away from the heart of haute couture — not just in distance, ...