An exhibition about a person would not unreasonably be expected to be about the person, and yet the V&A Museum’s homage to fashion model Naomi Campbell has a remarkably large hole in the middle – where is Naomi?
She’s here as an echo of memories, a more glamourous Miss Havisham inhabiting a room full of grand clothes on mannequins and locked behind glass walls.
But the story of Naomi is missing.
There are bits here and there, but one of the difficulties is that an exhibition about a living person who scrupulously controls their public image and is based largely on that person’s personal collection isn’t going to be allowed to dig too deeply into who the person is.
The exhibition is mainly a collection of clothes. It is not unexpected for the V&A Museum to have a fashion retrospective, but usually for a genre or a designer, where you can see the evolution of their career.
This is, candidly, a collection of clothes the model was told to wear and when to wear. Unlike say a collection ammased by someone famous who picked and chose what to wear, this collection is very much a buffet of other people’s decisions.
If you like looking at fashion, then this is a goodly collection of several decades of top fashion show clothing.
However, putting them on mannequins only seems to emphasise the missing element in a show called Naomi — in that the person and the occasional controversies is absent from the show. A dress she wore on completing five days of community service after being convicted of assaulting an assistant is here, but the descriptive text is rather missing the sense of remorse that you might expect.
I didn’t see any diamonds.
This is the sanitised version of the model and campaigner that her PR team would have approved of.
The exhibition, NAOMI In Fashion is at the VA& Museum until March 2025.
Tickets can be bought in advance from here.
A final note – when putting on an exhibition, would the designers please check for reflections in the glass?
I hope that’s an end to all these fashion shows at the V&A. It’s getting very repetitive and we’d like to see something else the museum is supposed to specialise in now please.