Holt Renfrew's Official Video for Spring 2018 (now on display on the store's mega-screen at the
Square One Shopping Centre in Mississauga)
"See Carolyn Murphy and Liya Kebede don the season’s most forward-thinking flourishes for the Holt Renfrew Spring 2018 Magazine."Spring Awakening/L’éveil du printemps: Video
Soundtrack: Tribal -
"Custom track made specifically for Holts.
The title of the song is Yup, Okay"
Spring Awakening/L’éveil du printemps: Editorial
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Below is an unpublished article from August 2011.
[2018 Update: Kebede is now gracing the big screen at Holt Renfrew's Mississauga store.]
Of course now it is no longer enough to have female models prancing around. We need some kind of interaction between them after all! And almost always that has some lesbian connotations. These women are not just besties!
Liya Kebede, the American model of Ethiopian origin, is on the May 2009 cover of Vogue magazine, and that's supposed to be a good thing. After Michelle Obama in March and Beyonce in April, Vogue is apparently on a roll adding her to the roster of "black" faces.
I don't know how Kebede got into the modeling business. By Ethiopian standards, she is not even that good looking. She is too dark, and her features are too mousy. She looks more Somali than Ethiopian. In a normal setting in her homeland, she would be called “cute” (especially if she also had personality), but not a beauty.
But, in America, what they seem to want in their "ethnic" models is that they either go all the way to the extreme end of the spectrum, like the Sudanese model Alek Wek, or have just enough Caucasian features (small lips, straight nose, high cheekbones without being too strong) and dark skin to figure as an acceptable "black" model. All this without looking too Negroid. This is actually the look of the super model, and mother of them all, the Somali Iman. It is not surprising that Halle Berry, a mousy-featured favorite film star, is so popular. Another mousy but popular model is the Indian Padma Lakshmi. Liya, Halle, Iman and Padma could actually be sisters.
It is frustrating to look at these women as models of beauty, when all they're really doing is fulfilling some ideological need of putting nonwhite models, whose looks are not too threatening, on main stream fashion magazines.