“Peerless”, “mesmerising”, “an exemplar”, “a tireless perfectionist”, “magical”: the accolades lavished on supermodel Naomi Campbell could easily fill this page and then some. Just how dreary and pointless that would be is hardly worth dwelling on, except that the V&A’s new exhibition is built entirely on such hyperbole, the likes of which would be only marginally less unseemly were it directed at a more deserving figure, like Donatello for example, to whom last year the V&A accorded the relatively lacklustre distinction of being “arguably the greatest sculptor of all time”.
The main objection to such grotesque adulation is simply that Campbell is very much alive, and in the usual way of things, people tend only to receive such grovelling acclaim in death, or because they are despots in the mould of Saddam Hussein or Nicolae Ceaușescu.
Naomi in Fashion celebrates the career of one of the most high-profile fashion models ever. As the story goes, south London-born Campbell was a talented dancer and a pupil at the Italia Conti school, appearing in music videos for Culture Club and Bob Marley in the mid-80s, when aged 15, out in Covent Garden, she was spotted by agent Beth Boldt – such were the times that she assumed at first it was her blue-eyed, blonde-haired friends Boldt was interested in.
Now one of the most famous Black women in the world, Campbell is lauded as a trailblazer, who after 40 years in the business, is, as this show’s title has it, still “in fashion”, her preternatural beauty inspiring a level of devotion that this exhibition both mirrors and amplifies in a riotous hagiography.
The cryptlike gloom of the show’s first half achieves a perfect and frankly hilarious climax of self-parody as you climb a staircase up into the light (yes, really), the opened out top floor a sort of celestial shopping mall, where you come face to face with massive projections of Campbell, and various testaments to her good works, notably as an advocate for equal pay and opportunities for models of colour.
Upstairs, the mawkish eulogising subsides somewhat, and a feast of sequins and other sparkly things is accompanied by a video of Campbell herself issuing “You go, girl” encouragement to anyone tempted by the Walk Like Naomi catwalk installation. In fact, this feature, which allows visitors to have their very own catwalk moment, filmed and then replayed as part of a montage that will grow over the run of the show, is by far the nicest touch, and will undoubtedly see much service over the coming months. But as a measure intended to introduce a personal note to proceedings, it rather unhelpfully highlights the fact that the woman herself is nowhere to be found.
Instead, static, featureless display mannequins serve as inadequate proxies, showcasing gorgeously absurd clothes from Campbell’s own collection, the V&A collections, and designer archives. Their extreme neutrality jars horribly with the testimonies to Campbell’s incomparable “walk”: the “someone inside who knows how to move”, deemed so essential by Jean-Paul Gaultier, is resoundingly, categorically, not here.
The problem with celebrating flesh and blood in a museum is that it all gets a bit weird, and since the only evidence of Campbell’s much-vaunted stage presence is conveyed in film, you inevitably start thinking about the often not very happy lives of dead movie stars.
The V&A has a long-standing reputation for staging spectacular fashion exhibitions, from its recent Chanel show to others on the House of Dior, Alexander McQueen and Mary Quant, and on photographer Tim Walker. As precedents they are misleading, however: their focus on an important body of work by a significant artist made them conceptually straightforward. Naomi is a great deal more unwieldy, her precise role, as object, creator or inspiration is never satisfactorily defined.
A clearer precedent for Naomi was the V&A’s Grace Kelly exhibition in 2010, though the crucial difference in that case was that it celebrated Kelly as a long-dead style icon, and built the show around her incredible wardrobe, on and off-screen. Though Campbell is quoted as being delighted “to share my life in clothes with the world”, she shares very little, and her inevitable close involvement with the exhibition’s production has delivered an unflattering impression of a ludicrously self-important person.
Her admission that “I’m not a perfect human being” rings pretty hollow, and is followed by a mention of the 2007 tantrum in which she threw her phone at her maid’s head. Just as it was back then, the incident is deftly spun to her advantage.
Despite its no-expense-spared production quality, it may be that even the museum’s director Tristram Hunt has had cause to regret the project, since in his foreword to the catalogue he pitches the show as “the first UK exhibition to focus attention on the myriad contributions of the fashion model”. Unfortunately, this more general assessment of the role played by models is, as he well knows, not at all what we have here; instead, Hunt articulates the bones of what would have been a far superior exhibition.
The makings of that entirely speculative, and infinitely more sensible, exhibition are already in place, beginning with the birth of the supermodel phenomenon, marked by British Vogue’s January 1990 cover, photographed by Peter Lindbergh (and the subject of Apple TV+’s 2023 series The Super Models). It was the collective impact of Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford and Tatjana Patitz, along with Campbell, which made the supermodels so transformative, and fashion became mass entertainment, with BBC’s The Clothes Show the Sunday-night answer to Top of the Pops, and George Michael casting Lindbergh’s five in the video for his single “Freedom! ’90”.
But Campbell’s supermodel colleagues get minimal mentions here, so it’s hard not to feel that were it not for the collective nature of projects like “Freedom! ’90”, the other four might well be excised entirely.
Much is rightly made of Campbell’s role as one of the world’s most influential and visible Black women. As the first Black woman to appear on a Vogue Paris cover in 1988 – the first Black cover model for Vogue was Donyale Luna, shot by David Bailey in 1966 – Campbell has consistently used her position to increase catwalk diversity, from her involvement with the Black Girls Coalition in the late 1980s to her campaigning work for The Diversity Coalition more recently, and her appearance on the cover of Vogue Italia’s 2008 “black issue”.
I wanted to feel moved by the copy of Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom featured in a mock-up of Campbell’s teenage bedroom. But its artful placement somehow undermines the gesture, making it more a plea for validation than a concise tribute to her friendship with the great man, who she got to know in the 1990s and called “Granddad”. I would have liked to have seen more about this unexpected relationship, as well as the other formative relationships in her life, and indeed more on the generations of young Black models who followed in her footsteps.
Some relationships simply cannot be ignored, and the show necessarily highlights the work of photographers such as David Bailey and Steven Meisel, as well as just about every designer and fashion house of note during the past 40 years. Even so, showcased as they are through fabulous gowns, magazine covers, and an overabundance of fawning quotes, any hope of getting to the bottom of what precisely makes Campbell an artist, rather than a conduit for other people’s creativity, is frustrated.
Time and again, Campbell is praised for her work ethic, skill, complexity and alchemy, but at no point is this expanded into anything instructive. It would be fascinating to know more about the conversations that go on between designers, models, stylists and photographers. This could have been an exhibition exploring the role of models in the fashion ecosystem, not least their crucial role in debates about body image, a topic that has evolved so dramatically since the era of the supermodels.
The clothes, of course, are marvellous, and it is fun to see certain historic moments expressed in them – the Vivienne Westwood platform shoes that caused Campbell to fall on the catwalk in 1993 are here, as is the extraordinary Riccardo Tisci for Burberry dress, worn by Campbell for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations in June 2022. Another special fashion moment is represented by the gold and turquoise, opera-inspired Chanel outfit, worn by Campbell for her first British Vogue cover, in December 1987; both the cover and the outfit are here. If the exhibition’s overall direction is flawed, the clothes offer consolation, marking high points of haute couture from the late 80s until now.
The accompanying book tells the stories of certain outfits, allowing some, if limited, sense of their development, however the show’s cramped labelling falls short, missing the opportunity to weave complex stories with creative use of clothes, pictures and words.
While the Alexander McQueen dresses for Givenchy are among the show’s highlights, their stories are better served by the book, which reveals a more thoughtful side to Campbell, as when she reflects on a fitting by Lee McQueen at Givenchy: “When I’m around someone like that… I just want to understand what the dress is doing, what it is I’m meant to be doing. And also to understand the context of where the dress fits in with the rest of the show.”
Campbell’s high profile means that she has the power to make careers, and examples are included of work by emerging designers she has championed. Among them is Nigerian designer Kenneth Ize, whose Paris Fashion Week debut in February 2020 caused a “global social media frenzy” according to Vogue when Campbell closed the show.
Stories such as this are fascinating, but so much better suited to a TV documentary format. Campbell here is presented as both artist and artwork, a premise that simply cannot work, unless we really are intended to accept the tale of lonely and unhappy brilliance that each empty dress so eloquently tells.