Could Taleedah Tamer become Saudi Arabia's first supermodel?
As roles requiring an ultra-sensitive approach to diplomacy go, being the editor of a Middle Eastern fashion magazine has to be up there. If you don’t believe me, just look at the recent furore surrounding the cover of Vogue Arabia, which showed Princess Hayfa bint Abdullah Al Saud, the daughter of the late king, posing glamorously in the driving seat of a convertible. The cover was designed to celebrate the lifting of the ban on Saudi women driving but came out at a time when many of the activists who had fought for the right to drive were imprisoned.
The latest issue of Harper’s Bazaar Arabia also focuses on Saudi Arabia, but takes a different slant, introducing Taleedah Tamer, a 17 year-old half-Saudi, half-Italian aspiring model to the world.
“Ever since Harper’s Bazaar Arabia was established in 2007, we have been very conscious of representing and giving a voice to the Arab women who are our readership,” says Louise Nichol, the magazine’s editor-in-chief. “We are about celebrating their stories, their successes, their struggles. Unfortunately that can have its challenges, so historically, women haven’t been able to be photographed or have a public voice but it is something that has changed dramatically in the time that I have been with the magazine.”
Firsts don’t come along often in fashion any more, but-as far I can tell- Tamer is the first model of Saudi Arabian descent to cover an international magazine. It would be flippant, of course, to suggest that a girl feeling that modelling is a career option is a meaningful measure of freedom and progress but, as Nichol says, “a few of years ago this would have not been possible, you wouldn't have seen a Saudi girl on the front cover of a fashion magazine in the context of being a model.”
“I have to be really honest with you, in the beginning, maybe because I was a lot younger I never thought that being Arab or Saudi specifically would be sort-of limiting factor to me,” Tamer tells me over the phone from her summer holiday in Greece. “As I got a bit older, I knew it wouldn’t be something which would stop me from doing it, but I knew it would be a bit more challenging.”
It helps that modelling runs in Tamer’s family. Her Italian mother Cristina lived in New York, Tokyo and Miami working as a model before she married her Saudi Arabian father, Ayman Tamer, who runs a pharmaceutical company. “I saw so many beautiful pictures of my mother when I was a lot younger. I used to think to myself, ‘this is what I would love to do’. I just want to take beautiful pictures like hers.”
Next week, she will make her catwalk debut in the Antonio Grimaldi show at Paris fashion week. She plans to continue to juggle modelling with her studies- she will soon be moving from Jeddah to Milan to study marketing.
Both Harper’s Bazaar and Tamer are adamant that she shouldn’t be held up as a ‘poster girl for a nation’, but she does hope that she will inspire others. “If there are other girls who are Saudi and who potentially want to do this, it would be amazing if they can feel more empowered to do it. With women driving, I have been seeing so many videos, it is amazing. I feel like it is something that we have been waiting for for so long. It is an amazing change.”
Diversity is a buzzword in fashion at the moment, but it’s rarely discussed that sometimes entire nations are missing from the fashion scene. Saudi Arabia has recently recognised the power of fashion by hosting its inaugural fashion week and Nicoll says that Saudi women are amongst the best-dressed in the world, underneath their abayas.
“There are multiple generations of girls who grow up never seeing representations of themselves in the fashion and beauty industries which I think can have an effect,” says Nicoll. “So we have always been on the lookout for a girl who has the support of her family. They need to be happy with that promotion because of the cultural sensitivity.”
“I always grew up in a very liberal, open-minded family,” adds Tamer. “If you loved something, then you were always encouraged to go for it.”
