THE MAKING OF MALAIKA
There’s an unmistakable ethereal quality to Malaika Firth as she glides on to the set of her HFM cover shoot. Sans make-up she’s dressed comfortably in cashmere loungewear, hair in a top-knot and she’s all smiles. The model, who broke into the fashion industry in 2011 aged 17, is a heady mix of British, Swiss, Kenyan and Seychellois. “My family is very diverse, it's such a huge story,” she begins in her butter-soft tones – an affable product of her native Swahili tongue.
Malaika (pronounced Mal-i-ka) tells us that, contrary to belief, it was actually she who persuaded her mum to let her become a model, after watching fly-on-the-wall documentary The Model Agency in 2011, and not the other way around.
“We watched the show as a family and my mum always knew that I wanted to be in the entertainment industry. When I saw the show about Premier [Model Management] a light turned on for me and I knew that was what I wanted to do – it sparked me.
“From then on I literally begged her every day. Then right at the end of the show, I said, ‘Mum, please I want to do it’, because at the beginning she was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah – you can do it’, but if I hadn’t pushed her I know it wouldn’t have happened,” she says, her wide-set eyes enlarging –
