The pioneer African American fashion model Renauld White attributed his unexpected, more than 50-year career to a football coach, Tom Higgins of West Side high school, in his native Newark, New Jersey.
White, who has died aged 80, recalled how he had been tall but chubby when Higgins ordered him on to the school team, and thus kickstarted his lifetime’s dedication to fitness and aspiration to a bigger world. This he achieved, modelling for the American designers Bill Blass, Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, Jeffrey Banks and Stephen Burrows; and becoming a glamorous figure in Jet and Ebony, glossy magazines for black readers, and in 1979, a cover star for Condé Nast’s then still very white men’s magazine GQ. He was a favourite face – animated, perpetually handsome – of photographers from Horst P Horst in the 1970s to Steven Meisel, who shot him for Dolce & Gabbana last year.
