The age of opulence: Malaika Firth models this season’s key beauty looks

Malaika Firth’s story is the kind of story that, were you to read it in a Hollywood script, you would think was too farfetched, too unbelievable, too good to be true.

As a 17-year-old living in Barking — having moved there from Kenya with her family at the age of seven — she was obsessed with Channel 4’s The Model Agency. She harangued her mother into calling the agency featured in the show, Premier. And that was that.

‘She rang them and said: “My girl loves your show, she would love to model for you guys.” They went: “Yeah, bring her in.” They didn’t know how I looked, they didn’t know anything.’ She was signed on the spot, picked out a new name (there was already a model with her birth name, Tamara, making waves at the time), and within weeks had her first job offer. ‘I was still in sixth form and I had to choose between school and Burberry. I chose Burberry.’

Working ‘nine to five, every single day’ under the soon-departing Christopher Bailey, other offers quickly followed, from ASOS to Marc Jacobs to Prada (she was the first black model to star in a Prada campaign since Naomi Campbell).

From the outset, Firth had a very clear plan for what she was going to do with the money she made: namely provide for her family. She has been able to build a house back home in Kenya (her dad designed it), where they all now live. ‘I’m like a film to them,’ she says, when I ask how they have reacted to her success.

‘That’s what I am. I feel like they’re just watching me on TV and they’re seeing me coming up and they’re just like, in awe of me. One day I can be Tamara, at home on the sofa, and the next day I’m like dressed up Malaika. If I’m going out to a party or an event, for them it’s just like a roller coaster, just watching me going to all of this stuff.’

For just a few months now, Firth has been residing, solo, in her first-ever parent-free home on the Upper West Side of New York City. She is single and happy about that fact (‘I don’t want to be held up by anyone,’ she says). Anyway, she notes, there is plenty to be getting on with.

The campaigns keep coming in and she is about to start taking acting classes, ‘because I really want it, the acting thing. Just have to push’. She is ambitious. Very ambitious. For example, when I ask her whether fame on the level of a Cara or a Naomi would scare her, she gives an answer that sits in stark contrast to pretty much everyone else to whom I have ever put that question. ‘You know what?’ she says. ‘I lived a completely different life when I was young. I didn’t have anyone following me around. So I think I’d like it!’

Interview by Hamish MacBain

Photographs by Olivia Frølich

Styled by Sophie Paxton Beauty Editor Katie Service

Fashion assistant: Eniola Dare. Make-up by Mel Arter at CLM using Urban Decay. Hair by Leigh Keates at Premier Hair and Make-up. Nails by Sabrina Gayle at The Wall Group. Set designer: Victoria Spicer. Model: Malaika Firth at Premier Model Management