The centrepiece of the V&A’s highly anticipated new exhibition on Naomi Campbell is a 15-minute looped video, beamed across an enormous white wall, full of magazine covers and photoshoots from the supermodel’s 40 years in the business. They reveal a Naomi for all seasons. Naomi with dalmatians. Naomi with a smile. Naomi in Playboy. Naomi slinky and scary behind an armed guard. She races a cheetah. She struts down the street. Everygirl. Vixen. Goddess. Bitch. Every role carried off with aplomb. Limbs like a racehorse, cheekbones that can be seen from space.
By the time the show concludes – there are two floors, the bottom a glamorous, dimly lit fortress of nostalgia and trinkets, the top open, expansive, with bursts of humour – you know little more about Campbell than you probably did going in. The mythology is there, of course – the tale of being spotted in Covent Garden at the age of 15 and gracing the cover of Elle less than a year later; the time she and Christy Turlington lived together in New York, two ludicrously beautiful teenagers on the cusp of world domination. Also present are the images and fashions that made Campbell, so long ago now, one of the most important and fascinating figures in British pop culture history. But missing are the sinews and the shading, the ambiguous chaos that has always defined Campbell in the public eye almost as much as those photographs.
The sheer novelty of Naomi: In Fashion may have made that kind of intimacy impossible – it’s unusual for a major fashion exhibition to revolve around the person who models the clothes and brings a designer’s intentions to life, and Campbell has been involved in every step of the exhibit’s production. She provided ephemera and clothing from her personal archives, supplied her own captions for each piece, and even curated the music.
It means that this is an exhibition largely defined by pleasure, gorgeous gowns and remarkable bone structure – not at all bad in itself, but perhaps not quite as arresting or insightful as it could have been. Still, though, what pleasure. We see the sky-high Vivienne Westwood shoes that made Campbell take an almost disgustingly photogenic tumble on the runway in 1993, recreated on a mannequin itself planked on the floor. There’s the pastel-pink 1994 Barbie suit by Karl Lagerfeld, its fabric so wafer-like you’d love to nibble it. The remarkable 1991 Gianni Versace dress with its multicoloured prints of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, which Campbell wore on the runway and then out to dinner right after.
And I loved the trinkets Campbell held onto from her early years – envelopes, polaroids, a Concorde ticket between New York and London, her chintzy name badge for the Yves Saint Laurent headquarters. We hear, blasting through the sound system, George Michael’s “Freedom! ’90” – Campbell famously appeared in its David Fincher-directed video, alongside supermodel heavyweights of its era such as Cindy Crawford and Linda Evangelista. Hilariously, Campbell’s Covid-era Hazmat suit, mask and Burberry cape look – immortalised in paparazzi photographs in 2020 and donated to a museum soon after – sits alongside designs from Balenciaga and Kenneth Ize.
Fundamentally, though, Naomi: In Fashion is only ever as revealing as Campbell wants it to be. The silver Dolce & Gabbana gown she wore as she strutted out of the New York Sanitation Department in 2007 – she’d been sentenced to five days of community service for reckless assault – is on display, somehow the campest spectacle in an exhibit already stuffed with leopard print and rhinestones. But while Campbell captions the piece with an admission that she threw her phone at a maid (“Some people can handle a drink or a line of cocaine, but I’ve finally come to realise that, for me, it’s all or nothing – and it has to be nothing … I’m not saying this to excuse what I did”), it’s the one real dent in the Naomi armour here.
It’s understandable why Campbell may not have wanted to dwell on the specifics of her past run-ins with the law, but when they’re often so entwined with the fashion industry and Campbell’s persona as the steely, impenetrable, impossibly chic glamazon – remember the Azzedine Alaïa knit dress she wore to the Hague?! – their absence is noticeable. You leave Naomi: In Fashion in awe at Campbell’s face, her limbs, her ability to transform herself so seamlessly on camera. But Campbell herself doesn’t necessarily come more into focus. Instead, she is, as she always has been, an image. It’s one that takes your breath away, but an image all the same.
‘Naomi: In Fashion’ runs at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum from 22 June. Tickets are available here