Flicking through Liya Kebede's pile of fashion-magazine covers passes a calm and perfumed afternoon. In 2002, French Vogue declared May was "All About Liya" month, dedicating a whole issue to the African supermodel after the editor saw her in Tom Ford's Gucci catwalk show.
Born 32 years ago in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital, Kebede was spotted twice. The first time, as a teenager, took her to Paris, where she failed, homesick. When she returned to Ethiopia, she met her husband, a hedge-fund manager 20 years her senior, and it wasn't until the second time, aged 23, in Chicago, where the couple had set up home, that it stuck. In no time, Kebede signed a £1.65 million (Dh9.3 million) contract to become the first black face of Estée Lauder. She sold handbags, evening dresses and Tiffany diamonds. She took a role in a Robert de Niro film, she was named 11th in a Forbes list of the world's top-earning models, she had a son and a daughter, Suhul and Raee, and then, in 2005, she took a breath.
We speak as she dashes through Manhattan between meetings. Taxis honk and men yell as she talks about her childhood. She describes the "beautiful, raw land", the space. And then the way New York shook her up, "the way it does everyone". It was when she returned to Ethiopia from the United States, where pregnancy is so celebrated, that she became involved in raising awareness about her home country's maternal-health crisis. In Ethiopia, a mother dies in childbirth every minute, leaving her baby ten times less likely to survive past the age of 2.
"There's a saying in Africa: To find out you are pregnant is to have one foot in the grave," she says. "Every time I go back home, I'm introduced to women who've barely made it."
Her soft accent leaps from drawl to drawl as she remembers meeting an elderly woman who, after her daughter died giving birth to her third child, was forced to bring up her grandchildren alone. "She couldn't afford food, let alone schools, so the baby was given away. It was such a tragedy — not only did she lose her daughter but the whole family was destroyed. When, in an African community like that, a mother dies, it affects everyone."
In 2006, she set up the Liya Kebede Foundation. Her mission was to reduce maternal, newborn and child mortality in Ethiopia and around the world. Funding advocacy and awareness-raising projects, along with providing direct support for community-based education and training, the foundation's success led to her recognition by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader. While Kebede's aims are ambitious, she is particularly good at promoting the small, gentle steps towards life-changing aid. She talks, for instance, about the importance of providing torches to villages in developing countries, to light midwives' paths to the houses of women with no electricity, but she is clear, too, that there is no small solution to a global problem. "In these villages, there are no roads, let alone hospitals. The last time I visited, I was told about a local woman who started bleeding halfway through delivering her child. The whole village carried her to hospital but she died on the way." These are preventable deaths, she stresses.
It was on another trip home that Kebede met local traditional weavers who were losing their jobs due to decline in demand. She says: "I promised to come up with something to help." She launched Lemlem (meaning "to flourish" in Amharic), a line of cotton children's clothes handspun and embroidered in Ethiopia, as a way to inspire economic independence in her native country.
Now the label offers women's wear, gifts and accessories — simple, soft striped shawls and dresses. And as one of few ethical ranges to make it into high-end fashion stores Matches and Net-a-porter.com, it is doing phenomenally well.
"It's important that we try and help the workers become independent, so by employing traditional weavers, we're trying to break their cycle of poverty, at the same time preserving the art of weaving while creating modern, casual, comfortable stuff that we really want to wear," Kebede says.
"In today's world, celebrity advocates are not rare," Ford says. "What is rare is to encounter one whose devotion and drive come from a genuine desire to better our world. Liya's work comes from a place of sincerity and her beauty is much more than skin-deep."
Kebede was recently named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People, alongside Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Oprah Winfrey.
She finds a balance, Kebede says, between campaigning and fashion. She was also seen at Cannes, promoting her first lead role in a film, Desert Flower, based on the critically acclaimed autobiography about female genital mutilation by Somali model Waris Dirie. Kebede recently travelled back to Djibouti, where they shot much of it, to host a screening in the village where the film is based. "That was amazing," she says, "to reach out to people and teach them without being forceful."
As a model, her success grows and as a philanthropist, she is taking on more campaigns. I ask how the two sides of her life sit with each other and she says: "Fashion has given me a platform, introduced me to inspiring people. But, most importantly, it has allowed me to do something amazing."
