Crowning glory

Naomi Campbell has been ruling the world's most prestigious runways for decades. With India on her vision board, the catwalk veteran discusses her new legacy, wearing saris and knocking on fashion's doorstep for a cultural reckoning.

- SHRIYA ZAMINDAR.

To talk about Naomi Campbell is to take a peek into the glory days of fashion in the 1990s. You’d expect the runway veteran, who began her career playing muse to the likes of Yves Saint Laurent and Azzedine Alaïa, to enter any room with a grand announcement of sorts. Instead, we had a tall Amazonian silhouette gliding through the set, all business. It’s a day after the Schiaparelli spring/summer 2023 show at Haute Couture Week in Paris, where Campbell, garbed in a wolf head coat dress, had made headlines. After all, she’s one of the original supermodels—the big six.

The fashion scene then was a vacuum, equal parts wildly exciting as it was exclusionary. In an industry notorious for gate keeping access to the inner sanctum and holding its seasoned runway recruits to impossible standards of beauty, Campbell was the one who abolished that status quo. In 1988, at the age of 18, she became the first Black model to bag a French Vogue cover. Back then, diversity and representation were not familiar terms in the fashion space, and yet somehow, this force of fashion managed to elbow her way in. Now some 66-plus Vogue covers down, she is adding another one to the roster, all while still ruling the catwalk for decades, which equals light years in the modelling business.

Legendary instances, such as Gianni Versace’s autumn/ winter 1991-1992 show, are just one of the many reasons why Campbell claims the throne. “This is one of those moments when fashion changed forever,” critic Tim Blanks said in an interview in 2013 when revisiting the iconic show. Now years later, the Super who crowned India’s Aishwarya Rai Bachchan Miss World in 1994, has different ambitions compared to her counterparts.