{"id":92016,"date":"2024-06-21T20:26:07","date_gmt":"2024-06-21T20:26:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/?post_type=articles&p=92016"},"modified":"2024-06-24T12:09:47","modified_gmt":"2024-06-24T12:09:47","slug":"naomi-campbell-victoria-and-albert-mueseum-grazia-usa-summer-2024","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/articles\/naomi-campbell-victoria-and-albert-mueseum-grazia-usa-summer-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"The One and Only Naomi Campbell"},"content":{"rendered":"
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At the V&A Conservation Studio, 2024. Photo Credit: Marco Bahler<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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\u2014the supermodel\u2014who 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 \u201cwalk\u201d doesn\u2019t 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 \u201cSupermodel (You Better Work),\u201d<\/a> his 1992 tribute to single-name-only glamazons, \u201cNaomi she is fierce!\u201d Or, as Beyonc\u00e9 later proclaimed on the track \u201cBrown Skin Girl\u201d<\/a> from her 2020 visual album Black Is King, \u201cPose like a trophy when Naomi\u2019s walking.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Chanel Spring\/Summer 1994, Fendi Fall\/Winter 1999. Photo Credit: Victor Virgile\/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images, Giovanni Giannoni\/Penske Media via Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This summer, London\u2019s Victoria and Albert Museum will unveil NAOMI: In Fashion<\/a>,<\/em> 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\u2014as well as points further afield like Lagos and Doha\u2014and 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to be in the theater arts. I got sidetracked into modeling.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cI think what\u2019s really remarkable about Naomi is both her longevity and her use of her platform to facilitate other narratives beyond fashion,\u201d says V&A Senior Curator, Fashion Sonnet Stanfill, explaining why honoring Campbell was a no-brainer. \u201cAlso it goes without saying that the clothes she has worn on the runway encapsulate the best of high fashion across continents.\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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Louis Vuitton Spring\/Summer 2008, Off-White Fall\/Winter 2022. Photo Credit: Stephane Cardinale\/Corbis via Getty Images, Victor Virgile\/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Campbell grew up in a creative home\u2014her mother was a contemporary dancer\u2014but as she tells it, modeling was never a career option she considered. \u201cI wanted to be in theater arts,\u201d she says. \u201cI got sidetracked into modeling.\u201d 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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Campbell photographed for ELLE UK at age 15, 1986, Yves Saint Laurent haute couture Fall\/Winter 1987. Photo Credit: Martin Brading, Pierre Vauthey\/Sygma via Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

To emphasize Campbell\u2019s unique physicality, moving images are a key motif throughout the exhibit. The very first thing you\u2019ll 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\u2019ll do her signature jazzy 1.5 rotation turn. The opening section also features some of Campbell\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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Thierry Mugler Fall\/Winter 1989, Accepting the Icon Award in a Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen gown at The Fashion Awards, 2019. Photo Credit: Victor Virgile\/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images, John Phillips\/BFC\/Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Also on view: a pair of Vivienne Westwood Super Elevated Ghillie platforms, vertiginous 11-inch heels that make pointe shoes look like child\u2019s play. Campbell famously fell wearing them during the designer\u2019s Fall\/Winter 1993 Anglomania show, and the V&A acquired the sample with Campbell\u2019s name scrawled inside soon after. \u201cThat fall is part of me, so I own the fall,\u201d Campbell says. \u201cIt\u2019s OK, people make mistakes. The most important thing for me is just getting up and doing it again.\u201d Spoken
\nlike a true performer.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere in NAOMI,<\/em> 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. \u201cWhen I did my community service, the paparazzi were there from the first day, treating it as if I was doing a runway show,\u201d she says. \u201cSo when the last day came, I decided I wanted to walk out and leave with my head held up high.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Vivienne Westwood Fall\/Winter 1993 Super Elevated Ghillie platforms, Leaving community service at the New York City Department of Sanitation in a Dolce & Gabbana gown, 1997. Photo Credit: Courtesy Vivienne Westwood, Photo Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Marcel Thomas\/FilmMagic<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At five foot ten, Campbell has always stood tall, especially next to Azzedine Ala\u00efa, the diminutive five foot two Tunis-born, Paris-based designer who she called \u201cPapa\u201d 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\u2019s close friendships with Gianni Versace, Alexander McQueen, Marc Jacobs, and John Galliano. \u201cShe refers to so many of the fashion industry protagonists as her chosen family,\u201d Stanfill says.<\/p>\n

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With Azzedine Ala\u00efa in Paris, 1991, Modeling a Gianni Versace Spring\/Summer 1991 gown for charity fashion show in support of the California Fashion Industry Friends of AIDS Project, 1991. Photo Credit: Arnal\/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images, Jim Smeal\/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

With her dancer\u2019s physique, Campbell inspired many of the sculptural, figure-hugging designs for which Ala\u00efa was renowned, and she even turned down more lucrative gigs to serve as his regular fit model. \u201cHer dance background did so much to inform her physical confidence on the catwalk and I think Ala\u00efa quite encouraged her to use that,\u201d says Stanfill, noting that there will be footage of Campbell bourr\u00e9ing on pointe and tap dancing from early Ala\u00efa 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 Ala\u00efa leopard-print bodysuit.<\/p>\n

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Givenchy haute couture Spring\/Summer 1997, Dior haute couture Fall\/Winter 2006. Photo Credit: Thierry Orban\/Sygma via Getty Images, Pool Bassignac\/Benainous\/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Among the scores of intricately constructed fashion pieces on display, there\u2019s a simple T-shirt emblazoned with the logo for the Nelson Mandela Children\u2019s Fund that represents Campbell\u2019s seemingly unlikely friendship with the South African president and Nobel Peace Prize winner who called Campbell his \u201chonorary granddaughter,\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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With Nelson Mandela at the Frock ‘n’ Roll for Africa charity event in Barcelona, 2001. Photo Credit: Stephane Cardinale\/Sygma via Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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\u2019s Diversity Coalition since 2013. \u201cI\u2019ve always called her my Buffalo Soldier,\u201d 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 Torish\u00e9ju Dumi\u2019s Paris Fashion Week debut during the Spring\/Summer 2024 collections.<\/p>\n

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With Bethann Hardison in New York, 2005, Torish\u00e9ju Spring\/Summer 2024. Photo Credit: Johnny Nunez\/WireImage, Antoine Flament\/Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A deep love for clothes is the connecting thread to all of Campbell\u2019s endeavors. \u201cA lot of us models, you put \u2019em on, you take \u2019em o#, and you keep it moving,\u201d says Hardison. \u201cNot Naomi. She\u2019ll be on the runway when she\u2019s 75 years old. She just loves it. She\u2019s really a fashion kid.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read GRAZIA USA<\/em>\u2019s Summer Issue featuring cover star Sienna Miller<\/a>:<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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