black supermodels
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In Love and War: This Couple's 1st Year of Marriage in Lockdown Reveals an Unconditional Love Story
Editor’s note: The following article contains a reference to suicide. With a new year, a new administration, and (bless it) a COVID vaccine now on the horizon, it seems we can end this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year with something tangible to look forward to—I believe Barack Obama would call it “hope.” But…
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Icon to Icon: Zendaya Paid a Stunning Homage to Modeling Legend Donyale Luna. Now, Can We Get a Biopic?
Another week, another Zendaya cover? Well actually, there are, in total, four versions of Zendaya’s December-January collector’s edition cover for Essence. But there’s also more than one woman being immortalized in this series of highly stylized black-and-white images conceived by Zendaya’s longtime stylist and creative director for the shoot (and 2019 The Root 100 honoree),…
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'She Is the Blueprint': Vogue's November Cover Celebrates the Iconic Impact of Naomi Campbell
Fashion may be fueled by trends, but Naomi Campbell has never gone out of style. The supermodel shifted the paradigm for beauty when she entered the industry in the mid-’80s, cementing her place in the firmament among fashion’s most famous faces by the early ‘90s. Three decades, countless covers and catwalks, and a few well-publicized…
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'I Knew I Was a Token': Beverly Johnson Revisits the Trauma of #ModelingWhileBlack—Including That Time They Drained the Pool
In case you forgot, supermodel Beverly Johnson is a g—one of the originals, in fact. And the woman who walked so Naomi can strut is far from finished wielding her decades-long influence on fashion, as evidenced by her recent revelations about her groundbreaking career, which included being the first Black model to land the cover…
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Supermodel Joan Smalls Commits Half Her Salary to Racial Justice—and Urges Others to Do Their Part Through Donate My Wage
The fashion industry has long prided itself on making statements, but its recent response to outcries for racial justice has left much to be desired in the eyes of some of its most luminous members. The black boxes splashed across social media on #BlackoutTuesday (June 20) have been followed by a similarly echoing silence on…
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Icon x Icon: Naomi Campbell Is the 1st Global Face of Pat McGrath Labs
It was just over 18 months ago that we were marveling at the fact that legendary beauty Naomi Campbell, then 48, had just scored the first beauty campaign of her decades-long career for good friend François Nars’ eponymous line. On May 22, the still-stunning supermodel celebrated her 50th birthday, accompanied by another major milestone: In…
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Essence and Naomi Campbell Celebrate Their 50th Birthdays Together—With a Supermodel Self-Portrait
Two paragons of black beauty turn 50 this month, and as much of the world continues to shelter-in-place, Essence magazine and Naomi Campbell are celebrating their joint milestone together—yet apart—as the soon-to-be 50-year-old supermodel provided a series of “self-portraits in isolation” for the magazine’s May/June special collector’s issue. It wasn’t the plan, but it’s a…
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No Filter With Naomi: Making the Most of the Moment, Naomi Campbell's YouTube Channel Launches a Daily Series
Naomi tried to tell us…and if we’d listened, maybe we wouldn’t all be self-isolating right now. Some considered the legendary supermodel paranoid when she showed off her fastidiously protective in-flight pre-cleaning routine on her Being Naomi YouTube channel last July. Nine months later, the fashion icon, activist and philanthropist proved to also be prescient, as…
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Pretty in Pink: Halima Aden Is Essence’s First Cover Star to Wear Hijab
She’s Muslim, an icon of modest fashion, and one of the models of the moment. Now, Halima Aden is also the first model to wear hijab on the cover of Essence, giving us all-pink-everything glamour for the magazine’s January/February 2020 issue, the first in celebration of its 50th(!) year. As the issue illustrates, Aden is…