Naomi Campbell’s V&A Exhibit Is A Blockbuster Tribute To A Spectacular – And Singular – Fashion Career

“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 exactly follow through. In recent years, the South Kensington museum has enjoyed record-breaking success with retrospectives dedicated to legendary designers (see 2023/2024’s Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto and 2019’s Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams), 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.

Naomi: In Fashion, 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 Vogue several times. In August 1988, she was the first Black woman to be shot for the cover of Vogue France; she represented the stratospheric era of the supermodel on the 1991 cover of Time (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 nerve-wracking to think of it as a homecoming,” Campbell wrote in the March 2024 issue of British Vogue.

Naomi Campbell’s first 1987 cover shoot for British Vogue is one of the first images to greet audiences as they enter Naomi: In Fashion.

Patrick Demarchelier

Campbell was the first Black model to appear on the cover of Vogue France in 1988.

“It’s hard to think of any other model that warrants their own dedicated museum exhibition,” says Sonnet Stanfill, senior curator, fashion, at the V&A, at a preview of the exhibition, where we are greeted in the ground floor gallery by a joyful montage of Campbell’s catwalk appearances. Bringing together pieces from the supermodel’s own extensive fashion archive, personal ephemera (including one of her first Concorde tickets, and her profile pages in Elite’s 1997 model directory book), and photography spanning decades, Stanfill has created a multi-sensory sojourn through the milestones of a singular career. One which has seen her form longstanding collaborative relationships with designers including Azzedine Alaïa, Jean Paul Gaultier and Karl Lagerfeld, photographers from Steven Meisel to Peter Lindbergh, and evolve after a certain George Michael music video from a supermodel with a capital “S” into a social activist and philanthropist, who bonded with Nelson Mandela and founded the Black Girls Coalition in 1989 alongside Bethann Hardison and Iman. As Campbell previously told Vogue: “To stand in front of my wardrobe is a humbling experience; vivid memories replay bygone conversations with the legendary designers who were among my closest friends and collaborators.”