“Now the things I do are not just for me anymore.

“There were a few things that I would do when I was younger that I was told were bad for my race,” Campbell says. She seems aware, perhaps more than ever before, that she is a Black woman with unparalleled influence. “Is it now that we have permission to speak? Well, I have always spoken.”Ĭampbell has spoken, but today she does so with a greater intentionality. “You understand where I come from.”īut behind the humor lies a genuine fatigue at the notion of the “angry Black woman.” So often has this phrase been explicitly or implicitly attached to narratives about Campbell that it’s painful to even ask her about it. “Now you understand the strength of my family,” Campbell says, gesturing around the table at her many mothers. Campbell was raised communally, surrounded by a clear narrative about the power of women and by examples of unapologetic-and dramatically beautiful-Blackness. To see Campbell with her mother and aunts-Aunt Yvonne, who accompanied the young model on her first trip to Paris, age 16, is here, as is Aunt June, escort for Campbell’s first trip to Milan-is to place her in what feels like the proper context. “Nobody does it like you.” Morris-Campbell nods in approval. I mean, I have to be really honest,” she says to her mother. It’s actually good to get to really know every nook and cranny of your home.

“A lot of the things Grandma taught me as a child came into play in lockdown,” Campbell says of the months she spent alone in New York. The closeness between the two only intensified in recent months. A dance career did, in fact, take her around the world when Campbell was young, and during those years Ruby stepped in to care for her. Like Campbell, she has failed to surrender to the usual norms of aging, her hair neatly framing a barely made-up face, her poise unmistakably that of a dancer. “I was panicked to fly over, but I’m so grateful that I decided to come.”Ĭampbell’s mother, Valerie Morris-Campbell, joins us at the table as we talk about her mother. “I just knew I needed to get to her,” she says. She is accessorized with an evil-eye pendant necklace, a constantly vibrating phone, and a packet of cigarettes that she places in front of her on the wide kitchen table where we choose to sit.Ĭampbell had arrived here from New York just in time to see her grandmother’s last moments, driven largely by a hunch. A world away from the “Pandemic fly on the runway, in my hazmat” Campbell (immortalized in Beyoncé’s “Black Parade”), the woman greeting me is one soft layer all over-smooth skin, black satin camisole and pants, sleek central part in her hair. Naomi, after all, is not just a supermodel instantly recognizable the world over, she is the prophetess of COVID-era cleanliness.īut Campbell receives me warmly, encouraging me to peel back my several layers of clear plastic, latex, and barrier-resistant fabric: “You don’t have to wear all that for me,” she says. Having panic-bought every protective item I could find before entering the house she is renting in an old, moneyed part of Central London, I was expecting to be the one reassuring her. NAOMI CAMPBELL is asking me whether I need proof that it’s safe to be in her presence. Photographed by Ethan James Green, Vogue, November 2020 Joining Campbell in the images that follow are just some of the models she's mentored throughout her career. Naomi Campbell wears a Dior Haute Couture dress.

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