MODEL MOGUL Mother

NAOMI CAMPBELL, at 51, is discovering what comes after GLOBAL ICON.

- MICHAELA ANGELA DAVIS

BLACK PEOPLE ACTIVATE fashion in a particular way,” my friend AJ (the artist Arthur Jafa) said with casual certainty a couple decades ago. We were poring over clippings of Black images he had surgically extracted from glossy Eurocentric fashion magazines. Now sleeved in big black binders and emancipated from their privileged published pages, they could be seen by us more honestly. Like generals in a war room, we studied the images’ relationship to one another and to us. It was an advanced exercise to train our eyes and sharpen our sensibilities, to decentralize whiteness and recentralize Blackness even in the whitest and most exclusionary of space— something Jafa elevated into an art form and for me was to become daily practice.

The runway and its extension into the fashion industry at large has historically been a very white and narrow space. And while there have been pops of color here and there of exquisite and talented beauties, Black and nonwhite 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.

Impossibly beautiful (as were Naomi Sims and many others not so named), she, like elite athletes and nearly all high-fashion models, is endowed with features not awarded by merit but gifted by nature. Naomi is a force. She not only activated fashion; she did so with sublime physical intelligence. She was ferociously elegant. From the moment her 15-yearold feet took their first step on a rare tight catwalk in Paris, she bodied every runway she ever hit. And now, at 51, she’s still walking like a Black panther, still undisputed.