Over her 40-year career, Naomi Campbell has been a trailblazer for black models and a champion of emerging designers. Sadiq Khan named her as one of the women who make London great. Nelson Mandela called her his honorary granddaughter. But she’s had her fair share of scandalous moments too, including throwing a phone at her former housekeeper and accepting some “dirty-looking stones” from the Liberian president Charles Taylor that turned out to be blood diamonds. Yet exhibitions aren’t there to celebrate good manners. Campbell brings the drama and, when she walks in a fashion show, the effect is electric.
Is that enough to merit a retrospective dedicated to one model – the first of its kind – at the V&A? That depends on how you feel about the past four decades in fashion. If you’re a fan of supermodels, admire the likes of designers Azzedine Alaia and Gianni Versace, and have a taste for glitz, the answer should be yes. The show is slick. It’s also small – tucked into one of the museum’s more modest gallery spaces, not meant for the blockbuster Chanel and Dior sell-outs.
The first thing that confronts you is a black corridor with a series of video clips of Campbell doing that famous strut on hundreds of runways in outfits that range from the beautiful to the bizarre. Further on, visitors can try out their own stride on an interactive runway, with a voiceover of instructions from Campbell herself.
The 54-year-old has lent clothes from her own collection to the show, including the pink satin ballet shoes she danced in as a Streatham schoolgirl. She even tweaked the exhibits at the last minute – adding more frou-frou and overspilling jewellery boxes to the one that recreates the chaos of a Campbell hotel room. There are magazine covers celebrating significant moments such as her appearance as the first ever black model on the cover of French Vogue. And there are endless fashion photographs on a loop, eight feet high, selected by her friend, former Vogue editor Edward Enninful, which show the photographers she’s worked with (everyone) and the gusto and imagination she brings to a shoot.