Naomi
Campbell

She is the model the September issue had to make room for. A South London teenager scouted in Covent Garden at fifteen, she walked the original supermodel decade and pried open covers that had been quietly closed. Yves Saint Laurent threatened to pull French Vogue’s advertising in 1988 if it would not put her on the cover. The cover ran.

Arc

She signed at fifteen and was on British Vogue in December 1987, the magazine’s first Black cover model since 1966. The French Vogue cover followed in August 1988. American Vogue’s September issue in 1989 was another first. By the early 1990s she was inside the supermodel cohort with Christy, Linda, and Cindy, on every runway in Paris and Milan, in the George Michael “Freedom! ’90” video that fixed the cohort in pop memory. In 1997 she was the first Black woman to open a Prada show. Three decades on, she still walks the season and runs the Fashion for Relief charity she founded in 2005.

Why she’s in the library

A face the model reads cleanly. High cheekbones, long jaw, the eyes the lens has tracked since 1986. Holds across runway light, magazine cover, paparazzi flash. Stable anchor for a fifty-face index.