Like NO OTHER

She BROKE BARRIERS and REWROTE the RULES. Fell DOWN, got back UP, and did it all in NINE-INCH HEELS. This is NAOMI CAMPBELL.

- LYNETTE NYLANDER

As you enter the exhibition "Naomi: In Fashion" at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, you are greeted by a video montage of Naomi Campbell’s iconic walk down the many runways across her 40-year career: a flirty sashay from baby Naomi at Todd Oldham in the mid ’90s, a moody saunter in a black silk outfit for Isaac Mizrahi from Fall 1997, a dead-serious stomp in a sequined black Saint Laurent tuxedo just a few years ago—all distinctly different, all distinctly Naomi.

A solo V&A exhibition on any one person, particularly during his or her lifetime, is rare and sought-after. (Previous honors have been bestowed upon Alexander McQueen, Frida Kahlo, and David Bowie.) I also observe, quietly, two Black girls, perhaps 16 or 17, who are transfixed, staring closely at the footage and swapping stories about admiring her beauty and “fierceness.” I smile, thinking of my own experience of observing Naomi Campbell from afar at that very age.

When I was growing up in London, Campbell’s image and mononym were so inextricably linked with fashion that when I told my West African father, a general practitioner with absolutely no knowledge of fashion, that I had aspirations for a career in the industry, he asked if I wanted to be Naomi.

The exhibition opens with personal images from Campbell’s archive. Baby photos, dance-recital portraits, her childhood ballet shoes, and a candid of a seven-year-old Naomi being tucked into a blanket by Bob Marley (she features in the late musician’s “Is This Love” video) signpost the celebrity to come. There’s one particular image, though, that holds my attention: a jubilant Naomi holding her mother Valerie Morris-Campbell’s waist as they dance and family gathers around the kitchen table in the background.