QUEEN OF THE CATWALK

It’s been more than three decades since Naomi Campbell burst onto the modelling scene and she’s been fighting to change the fashion world ever since. As the British supermodel turns 50, she talks retirement and reveals how she’s staying sane during lockdown

- LOUIS WISE

IT’S ONE of the perks of the job. Having been in the fashion business for more than three decades, Naomi Campbell has got to try out just about every health and beauty product available – but there’s just one she absolutely swears by.

“Dettol!” the British supermodel exclaims down the phone from New York in that unmistakable honey rasp.

They don’t know it in the Big Apple, she tuts, but “I grew up with Dettol. Dettol is part of my life!” She rewinds to her childhood in London. “When I came home from school because I went to a theatre arts school, I’d have to wash my leotard and ballet tights every day and hang them to dry. You know, that’s something I was raised with.”

I’m trying to join the dots in that dizzying trajectory from little Naomi, with her well-scrubbed leotards, to the icon we know now. She is, of course, one of the original supermodels, emerging in the late 1980s to offer a brand-new synergy of fashion and mainstream culture, alongside Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington and, later on, Kate Moss.

A muse to the likes of fashion designer Gianni Versace, Naomi has shot every campaign and walked for every relevant designer, showcasing the legendary “Naomi Campbell walk”, so famous that it’s a Beyoncé lyric (in the 2006 hit Get Me Bodied), so good that it even works out when she falls overdoing it, as in Vivienne Westwood’s catwalk show in 1993.