In 1987, the fashion photographer Patrick Demarchelier shot the supermodel Naomi Campbell in the desert wearing a gold Chanel jacket. It’s a stunning photograph and a historic one. This image featured on the December issue of British Vogue that year – it was only the third time the fashion magazine had a black woman on its cover.
The picture is so iconic it was acquired by The National Portrait Gallery for its permanent collection in 2016. It can currently be seen at the V&A in an exhibition celebrating the life and career of Naomi Campbell. Born in the 1980s myself, my teenage years were during the 1990s, when Campbell rose to fame.
It was uncommon then to see a woman of similar skin tone to me in mainstream media. This cover was groundbreaking, coming at a time when fashion editors believed that black models didn’t sell issues. It was also taken in the first year of Campbell’s career – a career which would go on to break so many more barriers.
As the fashion expert and writer Michaela Angela Davies puts it: “Black and non-white models are still generally regarded as a trend — seasonal and largely disposable in a mid-20th-century Dior-esque kind of way. Naomi Campbell disrupted that disregard. She was perennial, inevitable, and undeniable.
Naomi was the activator.” Naomi at the V&A is the first exhibition ever to focus on the person who wears the garments, rather than the designer who created them. It goes some way to correcting the historical oversight of th.
