There is no single image of the Filipina model anymore. Through six distinct voices, L'Officiel Philippines explores identity, representation, and the freedom to loosen fashion's expectations—one story and one pair of Levi's at a time.

PHOTOGRAPHY Karl King Aguña
CREATIVE DIRECTION Loris Peña
STYLING Yanna Lopez
Fashion relies heavily on a good silhouette—where a hem should fall, how a shoulder should sit, which proportions photograph easily, and which faces and bodies can be translated neatly into an image. Modeling has often worked through the same instinct: identify the look, then find the person who fits the prompt.
But Keanna Stroh, Raven Doctor, Eska Lhian, Cathrina Torres, Habie Mondido, and Kate Ang belong to a generation increasingly uninterested in fitting neatly into the frame.
Their stories begin from different places. Stroh grew up in Pampanga speaking Kapampangan. Doctor traces much of herself back to an island upbringing in Palawan. Torres’ life moved from the Philippines to Canada before modeling took her through Europe and America. Mondido grew up watching her mother work professionally as a model. Lhian describes herself through intensity, creativity, queerness, and constant reinvention. Ang foregrounds perspective, individualism, and a body fashion has not always treated as its default.
There are questions of height, body size, cultural identity, heritage, femininity, and marketability between them. What connects them is not one new definition of what a Filipina model should be. It is the rejection of the idea that there has to be only one.
There is a fitting parallel in Levi’s Keep It Loose, which takes something as familiar as denim and gives it more room and more possibility for interpretation. For these six women, looseness extends beyond silhouette. It becomes a way of releasing expectations that once seemed fixed.

<h3 dir="ltr" style="text-align: center;">The Shape of Expectation</h3>
Keanna Stroh has spent much of her life encountering different ideas of who she should become. Half-German and half-Filipino, Stroh grew up in Pampanga with Kapampangan as her mother tongue. She entered modeling at 13, first in commercial work, where the expectation was to be poised, feminine, cheerful, and relatable. As she moved into fashion, the brief changed. Suddenly, she felt she was expected to become cooler and edgier. “I’ve been asked to be almost every version of myself,” she says.
The more closely she tried to inhabit those categories, the less certain she became about the person underneath them. At one point, she says, she began feeling “more like a brand or product” than herself.
Eventually, she stopped treating identity as another brief to fulfill. “I stopped trying to fit myself into a categorical box and just naturally let myself figure out who I am,” she says. “I think I ripened in my own time.”
Her identity has resisted straightforward classification outside modeling, too. Despite growing up and spending her life in the Philippines, Stroh says she often finds herself defending her “Filipino-ness” because she does not always look the way others expect a Filipino to look. “There is no one image of the Filipino person,” she says. “I am as Filipino as I can be.”
For Raven Doctor, identity is similarly tied to where she comes from. Raised on an island in Palawan, she says provincial life shaped her values and the way she sees herself.
Once inside modeling, however, she began comparing her own features with models whose beauty seemed more readily recognized. She remembers believing she needed to be “stereotypically beautiful” to stand a chance. But Doctor says she was taught young to understand identity as something with purpose. Losing herself to satisfy a standard, she realized, meant losing sight of what made her presence distinct. “I know that it’s only me who can be me, and no one else,” she says.
Doctor also speaks proudly of coming from an ordinary Filipino family with extraordinary faith in her dreams. She wants to be remembered as someone who entered a room without becoming someone else first—someone with the “audacity” to take up space and know she belonged there.
It is a realization that runs through nearly every conversation with these women: perhaps the most useful thing a model can bring into the room is not her ability to resemble somebody else. It is the fact that she cannot.

ON KEANNA: Jorts, LEVI’S. ON RAVEN: Jeans, LEVI’S. ON CATHRINA: Tank top and shorts, both LEVI’S

<h3 dir="ltr" style="text-align: center;">Outgrowing the Frame</h3>
For Eska Lhian, finding that confidence first required losing it. Lhian describes herself as intense, multifaceted, and constantly changing. Yet for a time, she tried to preserve whatever version of herself she thought the industry would reward.
She worried about her hair because a certain look had booked her work. She questioned whether she could get more tattoos. She wondered whether her shaved brows were too alternative, whether she was thin enough, commercial enough, accessible enough.
“I thought I had to be this and that, her and them,” she says. Eventually, constantly editing herself produced the opposite of what she had hoped. “I didn’t recognize myself nor knew who I was at some point,” she recalls. “I felt lost and defeated becauseI had taken away who I was from my craft and for the sake of my craft.”
She began moving in the opposite direction: toward herself. At 5’2, queer, tattooed, and alternative-presenting, Lhian occupies a space traditional modeling conventions might once have treated as difficult to categorize. Today, she sees those qualities as part of what she brings to the work.
Her philosophy also changes the conventional relationship between model and image. Lhian no longer accepts the idea that the model is merely a blank canvas.
“I’m an artist too,” she says. “We aren’t just puppets. We bring life to everyone else’s visions. We are part of the vision.”
Kate Ang approaches that same question through the body. She calls herself “a fashionable baddie with a real body”—a line delivered with humor, but one carrying a critique underneath it.
At 5’6” and a US size 10/L, Ang grew up with an idea of modeling largely shaped by tall, slender women. Even within the category of being “curvy,” she says, there remains pressure to possess curves only in the “right” places.

Hooded jacket, LEVI’S. Sandals, CHARLES & KEITH

Shirt, boxers, and jeans; all LEVI’S

Early in her career, Ang worked on an intimates campaign and later discovered that the released photographs had altered her body to make her appear curvier. She remembers feeling anxious about the distance between the woman in the image and the body she actually lived in.
She now creates much of her own content partly because it gives her more authority over that representation. “The parts of myself that I once thought were reasons I couldn’t model are now some of the things I’m most proud to bring into the space,” she says.
For Ang, widening the frame is also about allowing femininity itself to take different forms. Confidence and sexiness, she argues, do not have to belong to one prescribed kind of body.
Cathrina Torres understands the instinct to fix what appears to fall outside a standard. Torres describes herself as a creative, an explorer, and someone driven by curiosity. She spent part of her youth in the Philippines before moving with her family to Canada, and later began modeling internationally.
As a shorter model, she says she initially became nearly obsessed with gaining a few additional inches. Walking into rooms filled with models three or four inches taller could be intimidating.
Eventually, she redirected her attention toward what she could control: her performance, her work ethic, and what she could contribute once she entered the room. “I just remind myself that I’m in that room because I also deserve to be there,” Torres says. What once felt like a disadvantage now gives her a different kind of pride.
<h3 dir="ltr" style="text-align: center;">Worn Your Way</h3>
If fashion often begins with something prescribed, personal style begins with what happens afterward. That is what makes Levi’s denim an apt material for these stories.
A pair of jeans can begin as the same recognizable object and become almost entirely individual through what happens to it: how it falls on the body, what it is worn with, and what memories become attached to it.
Stroh sees that process literally in her own wardrobe. Her denim has faded where her body bends and carries heel bites from dragging across the ground. What makes those pieces hers is simply that she has lived in them.

Jacket, plaid shirt, and jeans; all LEVI’S

Dress, trench coat, and handkerchief; all LEVI’S. Sandals, GVN

Doctor’s relationship with denim carries a different kind of memory. Before one casting, her mother used her last money to buy her daughter a good pair of jeans. Doctor still has them.
For Habie Mondido, denim leads home to Muntinlupa. A Filipina-Tunisian born and raised in the Philippines, Mondido grew up watching her mother work professionally as a model. But her memories of denim belong just as much to family life. She remembers her uncles wearing her late grandfather’s jeans for special occasions. Denim was pang-alis: enough to make an outfit feel immediately more put together. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a phase in my life where I wasn’t wearing jeans,” Mondido says. Low-waisted denim, in particular, has become something of a signature.
Torres finds home in denim, too. Her family’s move to Alberta placed her in a culture where denim was everywhere, and Levi’s now reminds her of the Rockies, horses, cowboy boots, family, and friends. “It’s almost like a second skin, an extension of my identity,” she says. And Lhian puts it more bluntly. “As for making a pair of Levi’s feel personal to me, I wear them the fuck out,” she says. She does not want clothes to exist untouched in a wardrobe. She wants to inhabit them until they become part of her.
It gets at what Levi’s Keep It Loose pieces can represent beyond fit. The same garment can accommodate wildly different lives. What gives it identity is what its wearer does inside it.
<h3 dir="ltr" style="text-align: center;">Room to Become</h3>
For Mondido, the process of finding a changed perspective began young. She entered modeling at 15, already familiar with the discipline of the profession through her mother but less prepared for its psychological demands. Clients could want a particular look, hairstyle, weight, or proportion. Mondido remembers being asked to lose more pounds while still a teenager, at a time when she was already struggling with how she saw herself.
“Someone else’s opinion was wearing my body, wearing me,” she says. Over time, she began stripping away what she had adopted only because she thought fashion expected it and exploring what actually felt like her.&nbsp;
Her relationship with Levi’s Keep It Loose is therefore less about indifference than release. “‘Keeping it loose’ to me means loosening the ties—letting things fall into place,” she says.

By 19, Mondido had represented the Philippines in SupermodelMe and became the first Filipino winner of the competition. The achievement carried particular weight because it arrived after years spent trying to fit into something else.
Torres’ relationship with Filipino identity carries a different history.
Growing up in the Philippines, she remembers being encouraged to keep her skin lighter at a time when much of the media around her presented fairness as more desirable. After beginning her career internationally, she developed anxiety about working back home: that her appearance might be considered “too Filipina.”
Being recognized now among a rising generation of Filipina models therefore carries its own kind of reversal. “There’s something very powerful about seeing someone on the cover of a fashion magazine like L’Officiel who looks like you,” she says. “A pure Pinay, a kayumanggi.”
Internationally, she remains conscious of Southeast Asian underrepresentation and of what it means to enter a room carrying her roots visibly with her. She speaks about wanting to become the Ate or mentor she once wished she had. Doctor’s sense of responsibility similarly reaches back toward home. Her mother’s sacrifices remain inseparable from the model she has become, and Doctor wants her presence to offer somebody else evidence that they can enter these spaces too. “I want people to remember that I never had to become someone else to belong in the room,” she says.
For Lhian, the message is even simpler: “We exist, and we belong here too.” Ang wants those who encounter her work to leave feeling they, too, can occupy more space—in fashion, in femininity, and in their own lives.

Denim shirt (worn as dress) and belts; all LEVI’S

Plaid shirts (worn layered), pleated mini skirt; all LEVI’S. Shoes, GVN

Taken together, these women are not proposing another ideal Filipina model. That would miss the point.
A Filipina model can grow up speaking Kapampangan in Pampanga and carry German heritage alongside it. She can come from an island in Palawan. She can be 5'2 queer, tattooed, and alternative-presenting. She can be kayumanggi. She can be Filipina-Tunisian. She can have a curvier body. She can be shorter than the women standing beside her at casting. She can carry home through language, memory, family, skin, perspective, or a pair of Levi’s jeans.
After all that, she can still choose to change. There is no single image of the Filipina model anymore.
That may ultimately be the more interesting promise contained in Levi’s&nbsp;Keep It Loose denim: not freedom from form, but freedom from believing that form must remain fixed.

MAKEUP Jazthine Manaloto (on Eska, Raven and Habie), Raffy Mendiola (Keanna, Cathrina and Kate)
HAIR Mong Amado (on Keanna, Cathrina and Kate), Carlo Roblico (on Eska, Raven and Habie)
MAKEUP ASSISTANT (on Keanna, Cathrina and Kate) Dominic Ocampo
SENIOR DIGITAL EDITOR Maura Rodriguez
FASHION ASSOCIATE Frances Laman&nbsp;
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Jeron Ellana&nbsp;
LIGHT TECH Jom Ablay&nbsp;
LIGHT ASSISTANTS David Ong, Albert Calaguas&nbsp;
PRODUCTION DESIGNER Aren Dale Santos of Ad Set Prod&nbsp;
ASSISTANT PRODUCTION DESIGNER Manuel Tarroja of Ad Set Prod
SETMEN Alexander Hapayan, Romy Dela Cruz, Erwin Arda, Erick Salvante, Jr Amahan, Philip Andres, Vincent Salvante
VIDEO DIRECTION Gian Gahisan
VIDEO ASSISTANT Rumar Fajilagmago

Take Up Space: Levi's

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