Girl on fire

Three decades on as the wild woman of fashion and modelling, Naomi Campbell is enjoying a career peak seldom seen in the youth-obsessed fashion world.

- Jacob Bernstein

A few weeks ago, Naomi Campbell was at Madison Square Garden in New York, introducing Rihanna at the Video Music Awards. There she was the next weekend at the Venice Film Festival for the premiere of “Franca: Chaos and Creation,” a documentary about Italian Vogue’s longtime editor, Franca Sozzani.

Seventy-two hours later, Naomi Campbell returned to New York and Madison Square Garden, where she took selfies with Kim Kardashian West at the Kanye West concert before heading off to Beyoncé’s “Soul Train”-themed birthday party at the NoMad Hotel.

Then, she attended a slew of events for New York Fashion Week, including Tom Ford’s show at the Four Seasons restaurant.

Beyond the party circuit, Campbell could be spotted on recent covers of Paper and Another Magazine, as well as in a fashion spread in Italian Vogue, where she was photographed with a mammoth new coffee-table book, simply called “Naomi Campbell,” which chronicles her 30 years in fashion.

Campbell is also on TV, with roles in two hit shows: American Horror Story (Star World Premiere HD) and Empire (FX). In each, she dialed up the camp and then died so glamorously, it was a wonder neither of her on-screen murders was captured in a noirish spread for W, the kind she has done numerous times.

Less than a decade ago, this fiery supermodel was one of the industry’s most notorious bad girls, an Azzedine Alaia-clad diva on the verge of becoming a tabloid joke after pleading guilty to aggravated assault twice in 17 months, first in New York for lobbing a BlackBerry at her housekeeper and second for scuffling with two British police officers at Heathrow Airport when her luggage went missing.