As one of the original supermodels, Naomi Campbell has strutted the catwalks from Manhattan to Milan for some of the world’s most exclusive and expensive brands. She’s been the face of Fendi, pouted for Prada and sashayed for Saint Laurent. At 53, she remains one of the most beautiful women in the world, with a face that is instantly recognisable.
So her latest collaboration has raised some eyebrows in the fashion world. On Tuesday, Campbell is due to model what must be the most affordable clothes ever to be associated with her name in a New York fashion show for online fast-fashion brand PrettyLittleThing. A world away from the silks, satins and painstaking stitching of the high-end fashion houses she usually works with, it’s a collection that starts at a mere £10, in which the most expensive item is £120, available in sizes 4-30. Not exactly haute couture.
“I’m looking at myself as a changemaker”, explained Campbell in a recent interview with Women’s Wear Daily (WWD). “I know that it’s fast fashion and that people have their criticisms. But as a changemaker, I felt this was a great way to effect change in the industry in getting my emerging designers [she has worked in collaboration with young designers Victor Anate and Edvin Thompson] recognised and seeing them on a global platform.”
For their part, PrettyLittleThing bills it as a “monumental moment” for the brand. Chris Parnell, head of design at PrettyLittleThing, told the Telegraph: “It’s not just a new collection but a historical collaboration that we believe will resonate strongly with our customer base.”
Savvy move – or brand damaging? As ever with La Campbell, nobody seems entirely sure. “She’s one of the supers who’s managed to keep herself relevant,” says one insider. “She catches on before anyone else does – she’s kind of a genius like that. It’s certainly a statement for her to do it.”
“Naomi Campbell will just take cash from anybody,” claims another, unfairly.
The PrettyLittleThing tie-in will certainly net her a tidy sum. While everyone remains tight-lipped about exact figures, “they pay so much money” says one person in the know.
Whatever Campbell’s motivation, the mother-of-two is guaranteed to make waves when the collection drops – because when it comes to Naomi, we’ve learnt to expect nothing less.
It all started several years ago when Campbell was introduced by a mutual friend to Umar Kamani, the multi millionaire co-founder and former CEO of PrettyLittleThing, who set up the brand with his brother in 2012. Umar and Naomi hit it off: they were pictured lounging glamorously together on a beach in the Maldives in November 2022, and she wowed the guests at his New Year’s Eve bash at his Dubai mansion this year. “The pair have become extremely close,” says a PrettyLittleThing spokesman.
News of the pairing dropped in July – and was immediately the subject of controversy. “The most disappointing collab to come out in recent times. I have no words,” said one Twitter user.
PrettyLittleThing may have posted pre-tax profits of £75.1 million in the year to February 2022, but the majority of its clothes are made from non-recyclable polyester; and in 2020, a newspaper investigation found that its parent company, Boohoo Group, was selling clothes made by Pakistani workers earning 29p per hour. An independent report carried out that year by Alison Levitt KC found that the fast-fashion chain knew about “serious issues” with the treatment of its factory workers but had failed to move quickly enough to address the issues.
In response, the company appointed Sir Brian Leveson to oversee the firm’s overhaul of its supply chain (he published his final report in March last year), and now says that it is “committed to ensuring that all garment workers producing the clothes we sell are paid at least the minimum wage and we will not work with suppliers who do not comply with this commitment”.
It has also published a new “Upfront” sustainability plan that promises all polyester and cotton will be recycled or “more sustainable” by 2025.
It’s a far cry from Campbell’s other more recent work. In August 2022 it was announced that she would be the new face of Hugo Boss; last month she starred in Victoria’s Secret’s Icon campaign alongside the likes of Emily Ratajkowski, Hailey Bieber and Gisele Bündchen, and she will lead the Victoria’s Secret World Tour later this month.
In March last year, aged 51, she was photographed with her first child, a daughter, for the cover of Vogue (she welcomed her second child, a son, in July). More recently, she reunited with her fellow 1990s supers – Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington and Linda Evangelista – for the cover of British Vogue’s September issue, the last under the editorship of Edward Enniful, with whom she is “BFFs”.
Her Instagram profile (15.5 million followers) lists her as “Dr Naomi Campbell” alongside the kind of portmanteau career list that positively elevates it to an art form: Mother/Model/Actress/Cultural Innovator/Activist. She ranks among the richest models of all time, and is reportedly worth $80 million. Not bad going for a girl brought up by a single mother in Streatham, south London.
“I like what I do, and I’m blessed that I still have all these great opportunities offered to me,” she said in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar in March.
Of course, her PrettyLittleThing collaboration is not the first time the model has been mired in controversy. Two years ago, Fashion For Relief, the charity she set up to raise money for children living in poverty, came under formal investigation from the charities watchdog over allegations of misconduct relating to finance and management.
In February this year, the Charity Commission appointed interim managers to the exclusion of trustees, including Campbell, although the new managers were unable to comment further for this piece. At the time, the charity told the Guardian it was cooperating fully with the investigation and said: “Any suggestion of wrongdoing or misconduct on the part of the trustees is untrue and denied.”
Campbell – who says she has been involved in multiple charitable endeavours over her career – says she never received a salary from Fashion for Relief; that any money paid out to trustees was repaid to the charity and that the events it organised generated millions of pounds for other charities.
In November 2022, Campbell came under fire for hosting a fashion show in Qatar; critics including Dr Nas Mohamed, the first Qatari to publicly come out as gay, said the move was “inconsistent” with her support for the LGBTQ+ community and that she was “trying to have it both ways.” For her part, Campbell said that “being engaged in places like Qatar is an essential step towards positive change.”
In September 2020, Campbell was sued by her billionaire ex-boyfriend, Russian real estate mogul Vladislav Doronin, who claimed that she was still in possession of some of his personal property, to a value of over $3 million (it was actually a countersue: she had originally sued him for also failing to return some personal property).
Her love life has been extensive, as well as complicated – as well as Doronin, she has been in relationships with, among others, U2 bassist Adam Clayton, Italian businessman Flavio Briatore, oil heir Badr Jafar, Brazilian equity magnate Marcus Elias and One Direction star Liam Payne, 23 years her junior.
Separately she appears in the alleged contact book and in-flight logs of late American financier and convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, as well as in photographs with Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell. In August 2019, Campbell addressed the relationship on her YouTube channel, admitting she knew Epstein after being introduced to him by ex-boyfriend Flavio Briatore, stating: “What he’s done is indefensible. When I heard what he had done, it sickened me to my stomach, just like everybody else, because I’ve had my fair share of sexual predators and thank God I had good people around who protected me from this. I stand with the victims. They’re scarred for life. For life.”
The father(s) of her two children remain unknown. In August 2010, Campbell famously made an appearance at a trial against former Liberian president Charles Taylor, where she was called to give evidence on a rough-cut “blood diamond” she received from him in Cape Town in 1997 (“This is a big inconvenience for me,” Campbell told the judge when she took the stand).
Campbell testified that the diamonds were given to her as a gift by unknown men that she assumed were sent by Taylor: she was never charged due to her lack of criminal intent, but the rumours continue to swirl. As one fashion insider put it, “What are you doing being given millions of pounds worth of diamonds by a corrupt leader in a hotel corridor?”
She has a famously hot temper and has been convicted of assault four times and accused 11 times of committing acts of violence against employees, associates and other individuals between 1998 and 2009. In 1993, even her agency, Elite, fired her, calling her “a manipulating, scheming, rude little madam”. “She is not a nice person,” says my fashion source.
Certainly, compared to her fellow supers – with whom she stars in a forthcoming Apple TV documentary, which comes out later this month – Campbell is still dominating headlines as something of a badass chick.
Cindy Crawford is reportedly now worth some $60 million and is married to businessman Rande Gerber. Christy Turlington, married to actor and director Edward Burnes, is a partner in a number of business ventures, an advisor to the Harvard School of Public Health Board of Dean’s Advisors and an advocate for maternal health with the humanitarian organisation CARE.
Linda Evangelista (“I wouldn’t get out of bed for less than $10,000”) is perhaps now best known for her withdrawal from public life after a botched cosmetic procedure left her disfigured.
“All I can say about this docuseries is that it was meant to be a celebration. I don’t think it’s the celebration that it started out to be,” said Campbell, darkly, to WWD.
For Campbell’s part, she attributes much of the difficulty she has encountered to race. “Last year I was refused entry to a hotel in the south of France because of my skin colour,” she said in a 2020 interview with the Times. “It’s rude. It’s wrong. And there are still certain countries where I don’t appear on the cover of magazines for that same reason.”
Will she hit back at her PrettyLittleThing critics? Time will tell. Then, again, so will sales.
Once again, it’s a turning point for Naomi Campbell.
