Naomi Campbell

• 1. Introduction

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  Naomi Elaine Campbell was born on the 22nd of May 1970 in Lambeth, South London, and by the time she was a teenager, she had already appeared on the cover of British Elle. She had been scouted by a modelling agency while window-shopping in Covent Garden, just weeks before her sixteenth birthday. What followed was a career that broke barriers in fashion so repeatedly that the industry had to keep inventing new labels for what she was. The questions worth sitting with: how does a girl from South London, raised partly by relatives while her mother toured Europe with a dance troupe, become the most recognised black model in history? And what did that recognition actually cost her?

• 2. The Girl from Lambeth

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  Valerie Morris, a Jamaican-born dancer, raised Naomi mostly alone. Naomi's father abandoned her mother when she was four months pregnant and went unnamed on Naomi's birth certificate. Campbell took the surname she carries from her mother's second marriage. Her half-brother Pierre arrived in 1985.

  Her early years were spent in Rome, where Valerie worked as a modern dancer. When the family returned to London, Campbell lived with relatives while her mother travelled with the dance troupe Fantastica. From age three she attended the Barbara Speake Stage School. At ten she was accepted into the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts, where she studied ballet. Dance was her intended career, and she trained in it from age three to sixteen.

  Her first public appearance came in 1978, at age eight, when she tap-danced in the music video for Bob Marley's "Is This Love", filmed at the Keskidee, a Black-led arts and theatre centre in London. She went on to appear in Culture Club's 1983 video "I'll Tumble 4 Ya" and their 1984 video "Mistake No. 3". By the time Beth Boldt, head of the Synchro Model Agency, spotted her window-shopping in Covent Garden in 1986, dance and modelling had been running in parallel for most of her life.

• 3. The Trinity and the Trinity's Limits

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  By the late 1980s, Campbell had walked the catwalk for Gianni Versace, Azzedine Alaïa, and Isaac Mizrahi, and posed for photographers including Peter Lindbergh, Herb Ritts, and Bruce Weber. With Christy Turlington and Linda Evangelista, she formed a trio the industry called "the Trinity" - the most recognisable and in-demand models of their generation.

  The Trinity's solidarity had practical force. When Campbell faced racial discrimination, Turlington and Evangelista reportedly told Dolce & Gabbana: "If you don't use Naomi, you don't get us." That kind of leverage from white colleagues was, by Campbell's own account, necessary. In December 1987 she appeared on the cover of British Vogue as that publication's first black cover girl since 1966. In August 1988 she became the first black model on the cover of French Vogue, but only after designer Yves Saint Laurent threatened to pull his advertising if the magazine did not place her there. The following year, her appearance on the cover of the September issue of American Vogue - traditionally the year's most important edition - marked the first time a black model had graced that particular cover.

  In January 1990, Campbell, Turlington, Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, and Tatjana Patitz appeared together on a British Vogue cover shot by Lindbergh. Interview magazine called Campbell "the reigning megamodel of them all". The group was cast in George Michael's "Freedom! '90" video, and the wider circle - now including Claudia Schiffer - was collectively named supermodels by the industry. With the addition of Kate Moss, the six were known as the "Big Six".

  Despite all of it, Campbell stated plainly in 1991: "I may be considered one of the top models in the world, but in no way do I make the same money as any of them." She was not signed by a cosmetics company until 1999.

• 4. Firsts, Falls, and Footnotes

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  In March 1992, Campbell starred as Michael Jackson's love interest in the video for "In the Closet". In April that year she appeared on the hundredth-anniversary cover of American Vogue, shot by Patrick Demarchelier, and appeared in Madonna's controversial book Sex in a set of nude photos with Madonna and rapper Big Daddy Kane. She twice appeared on the cover of American Vogue in 1993: in April alongside Turlington, Schiffer, Stephanie Seymour, and Helena Christensen, then solo in June.

  Also in 1993, she fell on the Vivienne Westwood catwalk wearing foot-high platform shoes. Those shoes were later displayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

  In 1994 she released a novel, Swan, about a supermodel dealing with blackmail. It was ghostwritten by Caroline Upcher; Campbell explained that she "just did not have the time to sit down and write a book." That same year she released the album Babywoman, named after designer Rifat Ozbek's nickname for her and produced by Youth and Tim Simenon. It was commercially successful only in Japan, where the single "Love and Tears" reached number 40 on the charts. Critics mocked the album, inspiring something called the Naomi Awards.

  Elite Model Management, which had represented her since 1987, dropped her contract around this period. She had small roles in Miami Rhapsody and Spike Lee's Girl 6 and a recurring role in the second season of New York Undercover. In 1996 she walked in the second-ever Victoria's Secret Fashion Show and became the first black model to open it. When asked years later why she never became a full-time Angel, her answer was succinct: "They could not afford me." In 1997 she became the first black woman to open a Prada show.

• 5. Activism and Contradiction

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  In 1997, Campbell stated bluntly: "There is prejudice. It is a problem and I can't go along any more with brushing it under the carpet. This business is about selling, and blonde and blue-eyed girls are what sells." A decade later she added: "The American president may be black, but as a black woman, I am still an exception in this business. I always have to work harder to be treated equally."

  In 2013, she joined Iman and Bethann Hardison in a group called the Diversity Coalition. Their open letter to the governing bodies of global fashion weeks named high-profile designers who used just one or no models of colour in their Autumn 2013 shows, calling it a "racist act".

  Her charity work was substantial and, in the end, contested. She supported the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund and organised a benefit Versace fashion show in 1998, held at Nelson Mandela's South African presidential residence. She supported Breakthrough Breast Cancer, whose single "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?" she appeared on in 2004, with all profits donated to the charity. In 2005 she founded We Love Brazil and also Fashion for Relief, which organised fund-raising shows for Hurricane Katrina victims, those affected by the Mumbai terrorist attacks, the Haiti earthquake, the Japan earthquake, and the Syrian refugee crisis. By 2011, Fashion for Relief had reportedly raised £4.5 million.

  In September 2024, Campbell was banned from serving as a charity trustee in the United Kingdom for five years after an investigation found multiple instances of misconduct and mismanagement. Between April 2016 and July 2022, Fashion for Relief had spent only 8.5 percent of its income on charitable grants, while making unauthorised payments that included covering Campbell's stay at a five-star hotel in Cannes, spa treatments, room service, security, and cigarettes. A sum of £345,000 was eventually recovered and donated to Save the Children Fund and the Mayor's Fund for London. Campbell appealed the ban, saying she was a "victim of fraud and forgery" and had "never undertaken philanthropic work for personal gain".

• 6. Legal Record and Private Life

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  Campbell was convicted of assault on four occasions between 1998 and 2009. The first conviction came in September 1998 for assaulting her personal assistant. She pleaded guilty in January 2007 to assaulting her former housekeeper, attending her community service in a silver-sequinned Dolce & Gabbana gown valued at $300,000. She documented the experience in a W magazine feature titled "The Naomi Diaries" and then spoofed herself in a Dunkin' Donuts commercial directed by Zach Braff. In June 2008 she was sentenced for assaulting two police officers at London Heathrow Airport. In July 2015 she was found guilty of assaulting a paparazzo in Rome.

  In a 2010 interview for British Vogue, Campbell stated that in 1999 she had entered rehabilitation for cocaine addiction and then joined Alcoholics Anonymous to get sober. She stopped drinking around 2012.

  Her personal relationships included an engagement in 1993 to U2 bassist Adam Clayton, who had publicly stated in an interview that if there was anything in the world he desired but did not have, it was "a date with Naomi Campbell". They separated the following year. From 1998 to 2003 she was in a relationship with Formula One team principal Flavio Briatore; they were engaged. In May 2021 she announced the birth of her daughter, and in June 2023 the birth of her son. Both children were delivered via surrogate.

  In August 2010, Campbell gave testimony at the trial of former Liberian president Charles Taylor. She told the court that in 1997 she had received diamonds as a gift from unknown men she assumed were sent by Taylor, and that she had passed them to Jeremy Ractliffe, then director of the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund. Ractliffe, suspecting the stones were illegal, kept them rather than donating them, and handed them to police shortly after Campbell's testimony.

• 7. Enduring Presence

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  In 2007 Campbell walked the catwalk for Dior's 60th-anniversary show at Versailles. In July 2008 she appeared with Liya Kebede, Sessilee Lopez, and Jourdan Dunn on the gatefold cover of a landmark all-black issue of Italian Vogue, shot by Steven Meisel. At the closing ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games, she modelled alongside Kate Moss and other supermodels to represent British fashion, wearing an Alexander McQueen gown with a staggered hem and a train speckled with flecks of gold.

  In 2015 she joined the Fox drama Empire as recurring character Camilla Marks, a fashion designer and love interest to Hakeem Lyon, played by Bryshere Y. Gray. In June 2018 she received the Fashion Icon award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America. In the spring of 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, she launched a YouTube web series called No Filter with Naomi; her inaugural guest was Cindy Crawford. The 50th episode, which premiered on the 16th of March 2021, featured Jean Paul Gaultier.

  In June 2024, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London opened a solo exhibition titled "Naomi: In Fashion", which displayed 100 curated outfits from her modelling years and highlighted her philanthropic work and activism. Campbell executive produced the 2023 film Invisible Beauty about Bethann Hardison, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival - a fitting collaboration, given that Hardison had stood with her in the Diversity Coalition's open letter to the fashion industry a decade before.