Ollia Tzarina ( @oli_tzari Instagram) is a high achieving high flying fashion designer who has dressed every celebrity in LA, from Beyonce to Kim Kardashian, Kendall Jenner and Mary J Blige. She is currently building her second brand Bio Lab Exotique with her business partner a pepsi heir Asghar Akhtar Khan.
I follow her Instagram and the other night she posted Q and A answering some of her fan’s questions. One of them was ‘how old are you’. She said that in the world of business when you are a public person its very hard to be taken seriously if you are considered to be too young. She went on to talk about how she faced age and sex discrimination when launching her iconic fashion label Tzarina By Ollia , and how she had to photoshop her passport to date of birth 1988 to be taken seriously by the industry business power players, she ended up doing a live story showing her two passports and a birth certificate that showed her to be born in May 22, 1993. Thinking about it after- I happened to agree with her. There is a massive stigma towards women in business especially beautiful young women. Would you really take seriously a girl of 23 who looks like a GQ model if she came to give a presentation in a room full of middle-aged men and women? Definitely not. You would judge her intelligence, maybe laugh a little and mentally dismiss her no matter how modern you claim to be. Just look at Emrata, the girl is a stunner who has done financially great for herself despite having a strong stigma of being just ‘that girl who ran around naked in the music video’. Did you know she got to be one of Forbes 30 under 30? Not for her looks- for her business accomplishments. Ageism, sexism is a problem and has always been for women, its a shame that in 2020 we still feel that way.
