The centrepiece of the V&A’s highly anticipated new exhibition on Naomi Campbell is a 15-minute looped video, beamed across an enormous white wall, full of magazine covers and photoshoots from the supermodel’s 40 years in the business. They reveal a Naomi for all seasons. Naomi with dalmatians. Naomi with a smile. Naomi in Playboy. Naomi slinky and scary behind an armed guard. She races a cheetah. She struts down the street. Everygirl. Vixen. Goddess. Bitch. Every role carried off with aplomb. Limbs like a racehorse, cheekbones that can be seen from space.
By the time the show concludes – there are two floors, the bottom a glamorous, dimly lit fortress of nostalgia and trinkets, the top open, expansive, with bursts of humour – you know little more about Campbell than you probably did going in. The mythology is there, of course – the tale of being spotted in Covent Garden at the age of 15 and gracing the cover of Elle less than a year later; the time she and Christy Turlington lived together in New York, two ludicrously beautiful teenagers on the cusp of world domination. Also present are the images and fashions that made Campbell, so long ago now, one of the most important and fascinating figures in British pop culture history. But missing are the sinews and the shading, the ambiguous chaos that has always defined Campbell in the public eye almost as much as those photographs.
