Renauld White, who is widely considered to be the country’s first Black male supermodel — and who for nearly half a century was an elegant and enduring image of American style, walking the runways for Bill Blass, Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Jeffrey Banks and Donna Karan, as well as being the first Black American model to appear on the cover of GQ magazine — died on June 26 in Manhattan. He was 80.
His niece Alonda Gregory confirmed the death, in a hospital. No cause was given.
Mr. White, at a lanky 6-foot-2 with a chiseled face and aquiline nose, was for decades a sought-after avatar of male beauty, photographed for editorial and commercial work by fashion stars like Charles Tracy, Herb Ritts, Horst P. Horst and Bruce Weber. In the 1970s, he sported a short Afro and a mustache — and, often, a disarming smile, as he did for the cover of GQ’s November issue in 1979.
That was a milestone: Though the first Black model to appear on GQ’s cover, in 1977, was the Swiss-born Urs Althaus, Mr. White was the first American. (The showman Sammy Davis Jr. was the first Black man to appear on a GQ cover, which he did in September 1967.)
Mr. White was, for a time, the face of Arrow shirts and Black Tie cologne. He was a pitchman for Miller Lite and Delta Air Lines. He was the first Black model to sell a hair product mostly marketed to white men: Vitalis Hair Tonic. He appeared on the Phil Donahue show in 1978, to discuss the myth of the “cute but dumb” reputation that accrued to those in his profession. He was as ubiquitous and desirable, Mr. Banks said, “as Naomi Campbell would be later.”
When he began designing under his own name in the late 1970s, Mr. Banks, who had worked at Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein, made sure that Mr. White modeled every collection he produced.
“He carried the clothes, he looked beautiful,” Mr. Banks said. “He was the quintessential American man.”
Mr. Banks recalled suggesting that Mr. White shave off his mustache in the early 1980s, for a Bruce Weber campaign of Mr. Banks’s clothes; Mr. White, he said, balked.
“I looked at him as the Black Cary Grant, and I wanted him to stand out from all the other Black models, not that there were a lot of them,” he said. “He resisted and resisted, but of course in the end he did it, and got tons more work as a result.”
Mr. White even attracted the attention of the Queen of Soul. When Aretha Franklin saw him in a television commercial for Black Tie cologne in the mid-1980s, she reached out to him, and for the next decade or so he was a favored escort.
“Suddenly she was in my life,” he told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1994, the year he accompanied Ms. Franklin to Washington to receive her Kennedy Center Honor. “I have always said my life is like a movie, and meeting her made it even more so.”
When the reporter pressed him — was it a romance? — he was diplomatic. “We have a strong emotional tie,” he said. “She’s a legend, after all. An icon.”
Interviewed by Ebony magazine the next year, Ms. Franklin said: “Renauld and I are close, very close. There’s a kind of unexplainable something that happens between he and I. It’s warm. I like it.”
Mr. White, Mr. Banks said, was a private, disciplined man, fastidious in his dress and his diet, gentlemanly and gracious in all settings.
“I never heard him curse,” he said. “He felt he was a standard-bearer for his race. As one of the first Black male models who broke through, he always felt he had to uphold a certain set of values.”
Mr. White often described modeling as “silent acting.”
“There’s not much demanded from men when we get in front of the camera,” he told the model Sharon Quinn in 2018 for her program “Model Behavior,” now on YouTube. “We don’t have to make great shapes. We have to be pillars of coolness, to stand there and be suave and debonair. You have to have something working in your mind so it comes out through your eyes.”
Renauld White was born on Feb. 1, 1944, in Newark, the second of four sons. His father, Robert White, was a truck driver and a natty dresser who favored suits on the weekend. His mother, Maybelline (Scott) White, was a hat model.
Renauld played right tackle on his high school football team and later performed in school plays. His parents divorced, and he began working right after graduating to support his mother. He had a clerical job at an electric company and took night classes in business; he found himself “hating it without doing anything about it,” he told The Durham Morning Herald of North Carolina in 1976, “except to rebel in small ways by growing a beard.”
On weekends he headed to Manhattan, where he danced the mambo at the Palladium, the storied Latin nightclub on West 53rd Street, and met the pioneering Black designer Stephen Burrows, who was also from Newark, and who encouraged Mr. White to pursue modeling.
Mr. White was rejected by the Ford agency because, an agent told him, he was too tall and had a scar on his nose (from being whacked by a bat during a childhood baseball game). The agent sent him to Wilhelmina, where, as he told Ms. Quinn, something came over him.
He remembered feeling, he said, that “you’re a Black man, it’s 1968, your city has been burned down” — Newark had been ravaged by racial unrest the summer before — “there are race riots in the South, but you’re in the North and you can do something about it.”
What Mr. White did was announce to the Wilhelmina receptionist that he was an official from the N.A.A.C.P. and demand to see the quota of Black models being represented by the agency. “If I’m not satisfied,” he recalled saying, “I will have pickets outside tomorrow!”
Instead, he got a modeling contract.
“Renauld made history,” said Musa Jackson, the model, producer and founder of Ambassador Digital magazine, who in the early ’80s was cast as the first Black male Gap model, and who was one of the many young men Mr. White mentored. He added: “He opened doors that he didn’t even realize he opened. I am forever grateful I got to walk through those doors.”
Mr. White also pursued a career as an actor. He was a stentorian Julius Caesar in “Julius Caesar Set in Africa,” based on Shakespeare’s original, at the Nuyorican Poets Café in the East Village in 1998. (Anita Gates, writing in The New York Times, said he “had the regal bearing of a king,” though she thought he was a bit too loud.) His other roles, both onstage and on television, included several episodes of the soap opera “Guiding Light.”
Mr. White is survived by his brother, Colin White.
Mr. White never stopped modeling. In the year before his death, he starred in a Dolce & Gabbana ad, photographed by Steven Meisel, who requested him, according to his agent, Ray Volant. It’s an arresting image: Mr. White in a pinstriped jacket, fingers forming a fist at his lapel, his gaze direct and challenging.
“Glamorous moments are few and far between,” Mr. White told The Morning Call of Pennsylvania in 1983. “The glamour comes in certain moments in this profession and you know it because they’re like gems, as when the right light is hitting a diamond. That’s when the glamour comes. The rest is not silence, but, simply, work.”
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