Alton Mason was scouted on Instagram in 2015 and signed to IMG. He was studying dance and theater at AMDA in Los Angeles at the time.

He opened Kanye West’s Yeezy Season 3 at Madison Square Garden in February 2016. The following year, he walked Gucci’s all-Black pre-fall 2017 cast under Alessandro Michele.

By December 2018, he had become the first Black male model to walk Chanel. Karl Lagerfeld cast him personally for the Métiers d’Art Paris-New York show at the Met. Alton had come to fashion through dance, and the runways began casting him for it.

By Louis Vuitton fall-winter 2019, he was throwing backflips down Virgil Abloh’s runway. The image traveled everywhere. Versace, Valentino, Rick Owens, Off-White, and Heron Preston cast him across the same stretch.

Lacoste cast him for the spring-summer 2019 Crocodile Inside campaign alongside Chloé Sevigny and A$AP Nast. Tiffany followed in 2021 with Knot Your Typical City opposite Anya Taylor-Joy.

His career argues for something the runways have come around to, that a man who dances through a show can do more for the image than a man who walks through it.