Naomi Campbell, even after modeling for more than 40 years, still gets nervous before walking a runway.
“I don’t take anything for granted,” Ms. Campbell, 54, said on a call last week from Claridge’s hotel in London. She was speaking ahead of an event with British Vogue during London Fashion Week for “Naomi: In Fashion,” an exhibition about her career at the Victoria and Albert Museum running through April 2025.
Ms. Campbell said she channels a new persona each time she participates in a fashion show, like the recent Ralph Lauren show in Bridgehampton, N.Y., where she modeled looks including a cropped white T-shirt styled with an elaborately beaded ball skirt. Such personas cannot be rehearsed.
“It happens there on the spot,” she said. “I feel the vibrations. I’m a performer.”
The Ralph Lauren show preceded an eventful New York Fashion Week for Ms. Campbell, during which she received an award from Harlem’s Fashion Row, an initiative that promotes diversity within the industry, and sat front row at shows including Alaïa’s.
As can sometimes be the case with Ms. Campbell, her presence at the Alaïa show drew outsize attention after people shared footage online of Rihanna walking past Ms. Campbell at the event, seemingly without acknowledging her. Some claimed the performer was snubbing the model.
“I’m not about to let the world pitch two Black women against each other,” Ms Campbell said. “We are two women with two children, mothers.”
Ms. Campbell, who has a son born last year and a daughter born in 2021, said she would not dissuade her children from following in her footsteps as a model. “I’m not going to tell my child what they are going to do — for me it’s all about the grades,” she said. “Once mama is happy with the education, you are able to go do whatever you want.”
Preparing for the “Naomi: In Fashion” exhibition, which includes about 100 wardrobe items worn by Ms. Campbell throughout her career, required her to relive professional highs and lows. She described the experience as “therapeutic,” especially when it brought back memories of working with friends in the industry who have died, like the designers Lee Alexander McQueen and Azzedine Alaïa.
A book released in conjunction with the exhibition features a selection of the fashion photographs that helped enshrine Ms. Campbell as one of the industry’s original supermodels.
“It was a time of great fun,” she said of her early career in the 1980s and 1990s. “It wasn’t about finances, it was about creativity. Nine to five didn’t exist — we were nine to whatever.”
Three Questions for the New Editor of i-D
Thom Bettridge, a former editor of the website Highsnobiety and of magazines including Interview and 032c, on Tuesday was named the new editor of i-D, the youth-focused fashion publication founded in London in 1980. He is filling a role that has been vacant since February, when Alastair McKimm, a stylist and Mr. Bettridge’s predecessor, left i-D after it discontinued its print editions.
With Mr. Bettridge’s hiring came another development: i-D will resume publishing print issues twice a year, starting in March. The title is owned by the model Karlie Kloss and her husband, the investor Joshua Kushner, who purchased i-D last year (the two are also reviving Life magazine, and Ms. Kloss is among a group of investors with a stake in W magazine.)
In a brief interview that has been edited and condensed, Mr. Bettridge, who is joining i-D after serving as vice president of creative and content for the e-commerce site Ssense, discussed his new position and his vision for the publication.
What made you want to take this job?
I really love magazines. They make sense in culture in a neat way that I think is more important as the world becomes more digital — it creates a record of what’s important at a given time. I think things tend to disappear digitally. i-D has always had an important role advocating for new cultural players that maybe other people don’t think are ready for the spotlight, which vibes with my own personal ethos of publishing.
One of i-D’s traditions is having people wink on the cover. What will happen to the wink under your watch?
It’s a controversial thing. I definitely think there are very few unbroken traditions like that in the world of magazines. Whether we wink or not, it’s a big legacy to contend with.
How do you feel about having a supermodel as a boss?
It’s been great so far. We see eye to eye in terms of how important publications are today. She is a real student of the magazine and the legacy of i-D. We are looking at building a global team with staff in both London and New York. We want to focus on user-generated culture that is uploaded by peers rather than top-down industry leaders, and focus on voices that have a grass-roots resonance. Those are the people defining culture.
Spotted: Something of an ‘It’ Bag
The slouchy handbag can be distinguished by two small mother-of-pearl buttons, stitched side-by-side on the front. It is offered in silver-foiled leather, saddle-brown suede and other materials reminiscent of Y2K accessories. And it has been worn by stylish young women including the singer Gracie Abrams, a Taylor Swift tour mate (and the daughter of the director J.J. Abrams); Megan Bülow, an alt-pop performer who goes by bülow, and who collaborated with Beyoncé on her “Cowboy Carter” album; and Abby Sage, also an emerging alt-pop artist.
The Cleo bag ($328) was created by Cleo Camp, 26, a set designer in Los Angeles and a former assistant to the Oscar-nominated costumer Arianne Phillips. Ms. Camp has used hides that are byproducts of the dairy and meat industries to make versions of the accessory, she said. Since introducing the style in June 2023, she has sold some 600 bags, she added.
“I started selling to friends, then it became friends of friends and then strangers,” she said, adding that people have told her that they’ve connected over the bag in bathrooms and in cities like London and New York.
“I call it a sisterhood,” Ms. Camp said.
New versions of the bag expected this fall include a style made with a textile developed in collaboration with Olive Diamond, an artist in Los Angeles, and another made of a leather-like material derived from apple skins. They will be sold on Ms. Camp’s website and at select retailers in the Los Angeles area.
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