“It wasn’t about me. It was about the clothes.” A statement from Naomi Campbell which – in light of the subject of the V&A’s latest fashion exhibition – doesn’t follow through.
In recent years, the South Kensington museum has enjoyed record-breaking success with retrospectives dedicated to legendary designers (see 2023/2024’s and 2019’s ), but never before has it dedicated an exhibition to a single model, one whose teenage success was so meteoric – and whose image-making is so iconic – she’s referred to by first name only. chronicles the astonishing 40-year career of the Streatham-born catwalk star, who spent her early years grooving in music videos for Bob Marley and Culture Club, before being spotted in Covent Garden in 1985 at age 15 by the model agent Beth Boldt. Since her first cover shoot in 1987 (the photographer, Patrick Demarchelier; the fashion, exquisitely embellished gold and turquoise Chanel Haute Couture designed by Karl Lagerfeld), Campbell has gone on to grace the cover of British several times.
In August 1988, she was the first Black woman to be shot for the cover of ; she represented the stratospheric era of the supermodel on the 1991 cover of (complete with the cover line “Beauty and the Bucks”), and in 1997 became the first Black model to open a Prada show. “I can’t imagine debuting my retrospective anywhere else but London – this is where I was born, raised and discovered – but it is, I’ll admit, more than a little ne.