What's in a Name?

From teen model to rising music star in Southeast Asia, Iman Fandi is forging her own path and proving that she is more than just her name

- Zue Wei Leong

Iman Fandi was once completely oblivious to her father’s fame. “I didn’t realise that my family name carried any kind of weight until I was 10 years old,” she shares, the only daughter to Southeast Asian football legend, Fandi Ahmad, and South African model, Wendy Jacobs.

“I had a normal childhood in Indonesia before moving back to Singapore and finding out that people knew who I was because my dad ‘did something’,” she says, referring to Fandi’s long and celebrated career in professional football, first as a player then as a manager to teams in Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia. “That’s when things started to shift for me.”

More than a decade later, Iman, 23, has made a name for herself as a model and singer-songwriter, signed to Universal Music Singapore with three singles under her belt: Love Me Little More, Timeframe, and Want. She steps on the set of Tatler’s digital cover shoot with an air of quiet confidence that can only be cultivated through years of experience. She nails shot after shot, unfailingly polite, and attentive to instructions from the entire crew, from styling assistant to photographer. Soon enough, Iman is sitting down for her interview, hours ahead of schedule.

Right from the start, the multi-hyphenate is game for discussing her family, unafraid to wade into the discourse about nepo babies, a buzzword created by the internet to describe children of famous people and their inherited goodwill from the public and their chosen industry.