Styled. Sculpted. Seen. -- The Unscripted Journey of Moosa Kalimullah

Moosa Kalimullah, an international student from Bangladesh, is in his Year 4 of studying for a B.Sc. in Quantitative Finance and Risk Management Science at Morningside College. Beyond campus, he is also a model who has worked with Gucci, Bape, Hound, Adidas, Maison Margiela, and GQ. With a passion for both fashion and bodybuilding, he wrote a book called The Tenets of Muscular Proportionality. His talents extend to writing poetry, making music, and creating content for social media with over 80k followers (IG @afsunmoosa). But to achieve all of this, he has come a long way.

 

 

Photo: Morningside College

 

Moosa’s modeling career began with boredom. “My transition into modeling was all because of Instagram and using social media, just posting there every day,” he says. With excessive energy and a ‘why-not’ attitude, he started posting videos with his friends about fitness training and OOTDs. Then one of those videos found the right pair of eyes. An art director from the L’Officiel magazine saw a music video Moosa had posted and invited him to a photoshoot. The photographer for that shoot? Wing Shya, the man who worked on Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love.

 

 

Photo: Wing Shya for L’Officiel

 

From there, Moosa launched his modeling career and started working for large international brands—the most recent of his shoots being with Gucci and GQ.

 

Despite his success online, Moosa is careful about his approach to social media and the danger of romanticizing it. “I would still advise people not to live their life for an audience,” he says. “It does, at some point, get to your head. You start posting and living your life for the algorithm almost. You kind of lose your individuality, which can be very scary.”

 

For a while, he admits that he did everything to maintain a perfect presence online. “Now I don't care as much. It's way more casual, and I share a lot more things. I share my music, I share my poems, I write whatever, I journal, I share everything, anything with people. And I feel like social media should be kind of like that. It should be more authentic instead of presenting yourself as something you're not.”

 

For Moosa, the journey of content-creating requires consistency and dedication in training the mind and the body. He has been working on his physique for six years. He wrote a book about it, The Tenets of Muscular Proportionality, which focuses on hypertrophy and learning how to design your own program. And his core idea is simple but unexpected. “The biggest thing is making a training philosophy so that you can be consistent, and for me, that is not about discipline,” he says. “You have to learn how to be devoted, not disciplined. Training has to become a ritual. It's like a prayer. Like how religious practitioners perform prayers, you have to go tend to your body in that sense to be consistent in how you look and how you feel.”

 

 

Photo: WPM House — IG: @wpm.house

 

He may have started for the wrong reasons—to create an illusion for his online presence. But once he achieved that look, he lost his motivation. Switching to devotion changed everything. It made him care about mobility, flexibility, joints, athleticism, and endurance, not just muscles.

 

 

Photo: YK, IG: @yk.w852, for Hound

 

Fashion and personal style, being a very important part of Moosa’s life, also changed over the years: “If you're always around the same people, you will never evolve your style. The more you go out, and the more you explore, the better your style gets.” He credits travel with transforming his style and picking up on how other people layer clothes, wear jewelry, and create shape through texture, color, and silhouette.

 

 

Photo: WPM House — IG: @wpm.house

 

Another turning point in Moosa’s life came not from modelling, exercise, or fashion, but from his Co-op program in Indonesia.  As part of his internship, he was building tour packages for a ferry company, which allowed him to visit tourist spots across the archipelago: Bali, Labuan Bajo, Surabaya, Lake Toba, Medan, Bintan. It was the first time he had ever been entirely alone and independent, which provided a lot of time for introspection. Moosa had already started posting on social media, but it was taking off slowly. During his time in Indonesia, alone with himself, he realized that he needed to be more sincere and respectful toward his calling to create. “I just started being myself,” he says. “Before that, I would just do everything that other people were doing. It just wasn't really authentic.” His followers grew from 8,000 to 50,000 during his time in Indonesia.

 

 

Photo: Unknown

 

As a senior student, Moosa emphasizes the importance of listening to your heart in his advice for other Morningsiders:

“See with your heart and not with your eyes,” he says. “If you can be observant with the emotions behind your observance, you just become a more soulful person, and you can put meaning behind what you see and what you take from it. That really helps you excel in every aspect of your life. Whatever you're doing, if you're doing it from your heart, if you're observing from your heart, then your work will be more meaningful. It can help you connect with a lot of people. It can inspire cooler, more interesting, more soulful art, videos, or music, everything. So don't be just observant. Be observant with empathy and heart.”

 

For someone who started in Bangladesh with limited opportunities, who landed in Hong Kong terrified and alone, who built a modeling career from a bored Instagram video and a fitness philosophy from devotion— that advice feels earned. Moosa Kalimullah owes everything to Hong Kong, he says. But reading his story, we get the feeling Hong Kong might owe him a little something back, too.

 

 

Photo: Bishop — IG: @bish.op