Naomi Campbell launched the ticket sales to her landmark, solo exhibition Naomi: In Fashion, which is set to open at the Victoria & Albert Museum on June 22, during an intimate brunch at The Dorchester on Wednesday 13.
With highlights from the exhibition, which will trace her 40 year career in fashion, on show — cue the towering, purple croc Vivienne Westwood shoes which caused her famous catwalk tumble in 1993, and the extraordinarily embroidered, silver Alexander McQueen gown by Sarah Burton she wore to receive the Fashion Icon Award at the Fashion Awards in 2019 — the supermodel was visibly emotional (and an hour and half late, but who’s counting) as she expressed how “overwhelmed [and] stressed out” she has been juggling raising her two young children and overseeing the show’s development.
“Because everyone expects such a great show from me, I feel extra pressure” she said to author Yomi Adegoke, beginning to cry. “It’s full on — I realised I had to stop working my day job, so I can really work on making this right.”
Her time has been spent collating the more than 100 outfits and accessories from various counties (“New York, Russia, Spain,” etc) which will be presented in the museum’s first career retrospective for a model. Her key concern is to pay proper tribute to the great designers for whom she has acted as a muse. “McQueen, Westwood, Mugler, Rifat Ozbek, John Galliano, Alaïa,” will all be featured. “There are a lot of personal items that I have never shown, gifts from designers — it is opening up my Pandora's box.”
A focus of the exhibition as a whole will be her role as a pioneering woman of colour in the fashion industry. “Today, to see the models of the colour, the diversity, and what you did Edward,” she said to Edward Enninful, former editor of British Vogue, who was present, and sat alongside filmmaker Steve McQueen and former McQueen creative director Sarah Burton, “I never thought I would see that.”
Campbell made a point of marking her fears for the future, however: “Now we are at a place where [we are asking] will it remain? Looking again at the collections, I’m starting to get nervous that we are sliding back [in diversity]. So why do I stay doing what I do? Because my work is not done,” she said.
As for the sentiment she wants visitors to leave her exhibition (“not a retrospective, Naomi is very much still working,” the V&A’s Senior Curator, Fashion, Sonnet Stanfill, was keen to stress) with, she said: "Hope, and the will and the drive to succeed.” For Campbell, that drive clearly has not faltered in four decades. In fact, there appears to be room for more growth, yet.
