Supermodel Naomi Campbell has shared that she regrets not speaking out against racism sooner, explained that fear of reprisals and being blackballed from the industry led to her longtime silence.
Campbell made history as the first Black model to make the cover of French Vogue in 1988. Despite experiencing decades of racist discrimination behind the scenes, she only recently began to share some of those experiences with the public.
“I should have spoken out more, but back then if you spoke out, people wouldn’t work with you,” Campbell admitted to designer Marc Jacobs.
The trailblazing model then revealed that she is working on a docuseries with fellow models Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, and Cindy Crawford.
The doc focuses on the lack of rights models have to their images and catalog of work.
“One of the things that’s really come to surface right now for me is that we don’t have any control over our image as models, and that’s really sad. When I was doing my book with Taschen, there were a few photographers whose names I won’t say, but who we do know and who I’ve worked for over the years for, like, one dollar, who came back saying they wanted all this money to be in the book. And I was like, “Excuse me, you’ve forgotten,” she explained.
“It’s our legacy that we’re talking about. I’m bringing this up because I feel like it’s going to come up sooner than later, so it might as well come up now. When we signed papers giving our lives away, no one ever explained anything back then, and when you’re younger, you want so much to be in a magazine or to do the shoot, so you just sign these things, but no one ever really, really explained what the small print was about,” she adds.
