Before there was cell-phone throwing Naomi Campbell, there was Black is Beautiful and ladylike, Naomi Sims. Raised under much harsher upbringing than the private school, dance-class filled Campbell, Sims went on to become a muse to fashion designers like Bill Blass, a role model to young brown-skinned girls and women worldwide, and eventually an wildly successful entreprenuer. She died of breast cancer on Saturday, at the age of 61.
Sims entered the modeling industry in 1966 while a student at New York's Fashion Institute of Technology. Her friends encouraged the lithe beauty to try modeling to earn extra cash. Every agency turned her down. Their reason: her skin was too dark. Determined to not let anyone write her future, she turned to photographers, convincing a well-known photographer to meet with her. His saw her potential and introduced Naomi to his wife, a fashion editor of The New York Times. Sims was photographed for the paper's Fashion of the Times magazine and featured on the cover. Then she went on a mission of self promotion. She connected with Wilhemina Cooper, a former model starting her own agency, and made her an offer: to add her agency's contact number to copies of the Times magazine, which Sims would send out to 100 advertising agencies. If anyone called back, Wilhelmina would get a commission.
Within a week, Sims was booked for a national television commercial for AT&T that showed her and two other models wearing fashions by Bill Blass. Within a year, she was making $1,000. In 1968, she became the first African American model to appear on the cover of a mainstream magazine. The title? Ladies' Home Journal. "It [the commercial] helped me more than anything else because it showed my face," Sims said in her interview with Ladies Home Journal. "After it aired, people wanted to know more about me and use me." After the LHJ cover, in 1969 Life magazine put her on its cover, with the headline: Black Models Take Center Stage, which featured her contemporaries Pat Cleveland, Alva Chinn and Beverly Johnson, who became the first Black model to grace the cover of Vogue. Other covers followed during her five years in the industry, including Cosmopolitan, Essence and Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine. She modeled for designers such as Halston, Fernando Sanchez, Girogio di Sant'Angelo, lived the fabulous life being adored by fashion's biggest influencers.
"When she put on a garment, something just m-a-arvelous happened," fashion designer Halston, one of the first to hire Sims, was quoted as saying in Black Enterprise. Even Cooper, who had been slow to see Sims's potential, was quoted in Black Enterprise: "She could make any garment—even a sackcloth—look like sensational and haute couture. Within two years of those first rejections, Sims graced the cover of every fashion magazine world-wide. Abel Rapp, a former model agent at Ford, recalled Sims' early years
in New York. "She was probably one of the most beautiful women I have
seen in my life,” Rapp said in an interview with WWD.
But life was not always so glamorous for Sims. Born in Oxford, Mississippi, the third of three daughters, her parents divorced shortly after she her birth. The family moved to Pittsburgh where her mother became ill and Sims was placed in foster care. She remained close with her sisters and followed her oldest sister to New York once she graduated from high school, receiving a scholarship to FIT, taking with her a resolve her foster parents instilled.
After five years of modeling and after marrying Michael Alistair Findlay, a Scotsman who ran an art gallery in New York, Sims stepped away to pursue other interests. She was 24. Her reasons for leaving at the height of her career? "Modeling was never my
ultimate goal," she told African American Business Leaders.
"I started to model to supplement my income to go to college....But the
idea of starting my own business had always appealed to me, and I was
fortunate that my first career led to my second." Four years previous, she told the Times: "There is nothing sadder than an old, broke model and there are
many models who have nothing at the end of their career."
Upon retiring, she started her own business making wigs for African-American women after noticing a lack of products available on the market. She partnered with a small wig manufacturer, created a new technique that delivered hair texture that was closer to ethnic hair, designed the wigs herself, wrote all the advertisements and promoted it throughout the country. Within the first year, it became a $5 million dollar business. Sims later expanded her business to include cosmetics and fragrances, and wrote advice books, including"How to be a Top Model," "All About Success for the Black Woman," and "All About Health and Beauty for the Black Woman."
Today, two photographs of Sims hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Model as Muse" exhibition. She is survived by her son, Bob Findlay, a granddaughter and elder sister, Betty.
See some of Naomi's best shots.
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