Even among the Trinity, Naomi Campbell is in a class of her own. At the dawn of the 1990s, Campbell, Linda Evangelista, and Christy Turlington came to represent a new type of global celebrity—the supermodel—who not only dominated runways and glossy magazine covers but was also a bonafide pop culture icon. Each supermodel was known for her signature walk, but “walk” doesn’t quite seem an adequate term to describe the way Campbell practically glides down the runway with the pure musicality of a dancer. As Ru Paul sang in “Supermodel (You Better Work),” his 1992 tribute to single-name-only glamazons, “Naomi she is fierce!” Or, as Beyoncé later proclaimed on the track “Brown Skin Girl” from her 2020 visual album Black Is King, “Pose like a trophy when Naomi’s walking.”
This summer, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum will unveil NAOMI: In Fashion, opening June 22, the first exhibition at a major museum to highlight the impact of a single model on the fashion industry and the world at large. The show explores why, three decades after the supermodel era, the 54-year-old Londoner is still leaving Fashion Week attendees spellbound in the four fashion capitals—as well as points further afield like Lagos and Doha—and how Campbell has used her fame as a platform for activism by championing emerging models and designers of color and leading fundraising campaigns for a variety of global humanitarian causes.
“I think what’s really remarkable about Naomi is both her longevity and her use of her platform to facilitate other narratives beyond fashion,” says V&A Senior Curator, Fashion Sonnet Stanfill, explaining why honoring Campbell was a no-brainer. “Also it goes without saying that the clothes she has worn on the runway encapsulate the best of high fashion across continents.” Stanfill and her curatorial team collaborated closely with Campbell to select looks for the exhibit from labels including Chanel, Fendi, Off-White, and Valentino, about half of which come from the model’s own archive. They also gave her the mic by featuring her personal anecdotes about the pieces in the wall text and the accompanying Rizzoli catalog.
Campbell grew up in a creative home—her mother was a contemporary dancer—but as she tells it, modeling was never a career option she considered. “I wanted to be in theater arts,” she says. “I got sidetracked into modeling.” When she was discovered at age 15 by model agent Beth Boldt, Campbell was hanging out in Covent Garden with school friends from the performing arts academy she attended, and was already an accomplished stage kid who had tap danced in a Culture Club music video and performed for Queen Elizabeth II. Nevertheless, within a year, Campbell would be fluttering down the Yves Saint Laurent haute couture Fall/ Winter 1987 runway in Paris in a feathered cocktail dress and discovering her new calling.
To emphasize Campbell’s unique physicality, moving images are a key motif throughout the exhibit. The very first thing you’ll see upon entering is a life-size screen with a loop of Campbell walking towards you, using show footage from throughout her career. In some clips she will stop and pose at the end of the catwalk like a prima ballerina making her curtain call while in others she’ll do her signature jazzy 1.5 rotation turn. The opening section also features some of Campbell’s most memorable looks like a Warhol Marilyn screenprint dress from the Versace Spring/Summer 1991 show, which she later reprised at a Los Angeles AIDS fundraiser; a Thierry Mugler Fall/Winter 1989 car-inspired corset fashioned from plastic, metal, and acrylic; and the glittering Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen gown she wore in 2019 to receive the Fashion Icon Award at the Fashion Awards organized by the British Fashion Council.
Also on view: a pair of Vivienne Westwood Super Elevated Ghillie platforms, vertiginous 11-inch heels that make pointe shoes look like child’s play. Campbell famously fell wearing them during the designer’s Fall/Winter 1993 Anglomania show, and the V&A acquired the sample with Campbell’s name scrawled inside soon after. “That fall is part of me, so I own the fall,” Campbell says. “It’s OK, people make mistakes. The most important thing for me is just getting up and doing it again.” Spoken like a true performer.
Elsewhere in NAOMI, Campbell chose to exhibit the silvery crystal-embellished Dolce & Gabbana demicouture gown that she wore to exit the New York Sanitation Department on her final day of community service following a 2007 assault conviction for a much publicized phone throwing incident. “When I did my community service, the paparazzi were there from the first day, treating it as if I was doing a runway show,” she says. “So when the last day came, I decided I wanted to walk out and leave with my head held up high.”
At five foot ten, Campbell has always stood tall, especially next to Azzedine Alaïa, the diminutive five foot two Tunis-born, Paris-based designer who she called “Papa” and even lived with for a time as a teen model. Theirs is one of the more-than-designer-muse relationships the exhibit explores, alongside Campbell’s close friendships with Gianni Versace, Alexander McQueen, Marc Jacobs, and John Galliano. “She refers to so many of the fashion industry protagonists as her chosen family,” Stanfill says.
With her dancer’s physique, Campbell inspired many of the sculptural, figure-hugging designs for which Alaïa was renowned, and she even turned down more lucrative gigs to serve as his regular fit model. “Her dance background did so much to inform her physical confidence on the catwalk and I think Alaïa quite encouraged her to use that,” says Stanfill, noting that there will be footage of Campbell bourréing on pointe and tap dancing from early Alaïa shows and a special mannequin recreating her graceful seated posture from a famous 1991 black-and-white Herb Ritts portrait for which she donned an Alaïa leopard-print bodysuit.
Among the scores of intricately constructed fashion pieces on display, there’s a simple T-shirt emblazoned with the logo for the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund that represents Campbell’s seemingly unlikely friendship with the South African president and Nobel Peace Prize winner who called Campbell his “honorary granddaughter,” and who she credits with inspiring her to use her platform for social change. Campbell brought some of her supermodel friends to South Africa in 1998 to stage a charity fashion show with Versace in support of Mandela’s fund, and later established her own nonprofit, Fashion for Relief, in 2005, which raised millions of dollars for a variety of causes including disaster relief and fighting public health scourges like Ebola and Covid-19.
Campbell has, too often, been the first Black model to appear on the cover of a number of magazines, and one of only a few Black models cast in certain shows. Since joining the Black Girls Coalition in 1989, a lobbying group founded by two top models from an earlier generation, Bethann Hardison and Iman, Campbell has been a consistent and vocal campaigner for equity in the fashion industry, also speaking out for the importance of diverse representation through Hardison’s Diversity Coalition since 2013. “I’ve always called her my Buffalo Soldier,” says Hardison. More recently, Campbell has also shined her light on emerging designers of color by walking in their shows, as she did for a number of designers at Arise Fashion Week in Lagos in 2019 and the Emerge talent showcase in Doha in 2022, or for British-Nigerian-Brazilian designer Torishéju Dumi’s Paris Fashion Week debut during the Spring/Summer 2024 collections.
A deep love for clothes is the connecting thread to all of Campbell’s endeavors. “A lot of us models, you put ’em on, you take ’em o#, and you keep it moving,” says Hardison. “Not Naomi. She’ll be on the runway when she’s 75 years old. She just loves it. She’s really a fashion kid.”
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