The Cut - Naomi Campbell Is Undisputed

“Black people activate fashion in a particular way,” my friend AJ (the artist Arthur Jafa) said with casual certainty a couple decades ago. We were poring over clippings of Black images he had surgically extracted from glossy Eurocentric fashion magazines. Now sleeved in big black binders and emancipated from their privileged published pages, they could be seen by us more honestly. Like generals in a war room, we studied the images’ relationship to one another and to us. It was an advanced exercise to train our eyes and sharpen our sensibilities, to decentralize whiteness and recentralize Blackness even in the whitest and most exclusionary of spaces — something Jafa elevated into an art form and, for me, was to become daily practice.

The runway and its extension into the fashion industry at large has historically been a very white and narrow space. And while there have been pops of color here and there of exquisite and talented beauties, Black and nonwhite models are still generally regarded as a trend — seasonal and largely disposable in a mid-20th-century Dior-esque kind of way. Naomi Campbell disrupted that disregard. She was perennial, inevitable, and undeniable. Naomi was the activator.

The New York Blood Center has announced that there’s a blood emergency in the state, and they’re in desperate need of donors — sign up to give here. J.Lo looked amazing in brocade at Dolce & Gabbana’s epic Alta Moda show; those at the menswear show were less lucky. Evan Rachel Wood stood up for herself, and for all survivors of intimate partner abuse. The United States has lost its spot on the E.U.’s safe travel list due to rising COVID rates. Remember Elizabeth Holmes, from the Theranos scandal that was 10,000 years ago now? Her trial begins tomorrow. And communication planet Mercury entered Libra this morning — find out what that means for your weekly horoscope.

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