Israeli Yael Shelbia Fronts 'Shalom' Historic L'Officiel Arabia Cover by Yossi Michaeli

With great excitement, L’Officiel Arabia celebrated the arrival of model Yael Shelbia as the first Israeli model to cover a UAE magazine since the signing of the Abraham Accords. AOC searched our memory — Abraham Accords — was that 30 years ago — 50 years ago? The Middle East is a mess forever, and the Abraham Accords was not front and center in our minds. We’ll clarify the Abraham Accords in a moment.

Yael Shelbia comes with much fanfare about winning some international, beautiful-face award. That’s never our interest at AOC, as thousands of women are a beutiful face, and we’re not about to fall down that rabbit hole of claiming one to be more beautiful than the next. Not when we study the scientific research around beauty standards.

Yael Shelbia is here on AOC because she’s Israeli, and she’s appearing in the pages of L’Officiel Arabia’s February issue. Stylist /creative director Julia Morris chooses elegant, sumptuous-fabrics and silhouettes luxury perfect for the fashion story ‘Shalom’ shot by Yossi Michaeli [IG] at Manhattan’s Peninsula Hotel./ Hair by David Cruz; makeup by Georgina Billington

The Abraham Accords Declaration was issued as a joint statement between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States on August 13, 2020. Bahrain was shortly incorporated into the agreement, marking the first public normalization of relations between an Arab country and Israel since that of Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994.

The 1979 Camp David Accords, brokered by US president Jimmy Carter at Camp David, resulted in the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Sadat paid a very heavy price for the peace deal, with Egypt’s membership in the Arab league suspended until 1989 and Sadat being assassinated on October 6, 1981.

Within this reality of relentless pain, anguish and suffering in the Middle East, the new signing of the Abraham Accords Declaration is an important step forward on the rocky road to peace in the Middle East.

Just yesterday AOC mentioned the relentless boo-hooing of a significant number of fashionistas who want fashion world to return to “normal”. Equally large numbers of fashion-lovers have no desire to return to that world, one that feels devoid of embraceable values in a COVID universe.

Writing about the celebration of Israeli model Yael Shelbia on its cover, L’Officiel Arabia sums up AOC’s long-held position on the intersection of fashion and politics:

If this pandemic has taught us anything about fashion, it is that it is always about more than clothes or products. It is about ideas, societal movements, the zeitgeist – things, that not only define how we dress, but who we are as a culture. It reflects what happens in our lives and how these events change our habits. For this reason, it is also strongly entangled with politics: It expresses and communicates beliefs and convictions, it distinguishes people from one another, but it can also unite them around common ideas.