Naomi Sims: The Great Ambassador

I was looking through a stack of my magazines the other night and noticed that most of these models were white. Where are the Asians? The Hispanics? The African Americans? I decided to look into it. I began to search for the first black supermodel and came to find many titles point towards the recent death of a woman named Naomi Sims.

Naomi Sims was the first black supermodel. She was first featured on the cover of Ladies' Home Journal in 1968. What struck me as odd was that she was described as nearly six-feet tall, with ebony skin, and African features.

What exactly are considered African features? Does this mean that she is darker than white people or the fair skinned black women? Or more tribal? How can one's features be categorized based off of their ethnic origin.

Naomi Sim's mother gave her away at the age of 10. Coming from a broken family, she spent time in a group home and then was raised by a working-class black couple in Pittsburgh. There, she lived in a home with another foster child, a younger girl in the house, who was of a lighter color. Naomi recalled that the younger foster daughter was treated like a daughter while she felt more like a helper.

As one of the four stereotypes of Black women discussed in an article by Woodward and Mastin, "the Black woman is characterized as a loyal domestic servant to White people." Perhaps this explains why Naomi was treated more like a worker to that family than a daughter.

Now this view on her god-given skin color followed her into her career. Modeling agencies constantly turned her down in the late '60's because her skin was too dark but Sims finally convinced photographer Gosta Peterson to capture her for the cover of The New York Times Magazine's "Fashions of the Times" in 1967. This must've been a great move for Peterson at this time since he was photographing models such as Twiggy along with deciding to capture Naomi Sims.

From an article by Tate, "During the 1970's, black girls growing up in Britain were influenced by dominant notions of female attractiveness which appear in their desire for 'long flowing hair, lighter skin and aquiline features'". Along with this, early Europeans, after first entering the

continent of Africa, connected the attributes of these Africans with "savagery, bestiality, lecherousness, and being uncivilized" (Tate). I admire Naomi for her strength in surpassing these views on her.

Naomi was the first... she was the great ambassador for all black people. She broke down all the social barriers. She was able to break through in a time where models were mainly all white and show that her color did not define who she was as a savage and uncivilized and allowed her to be part of that era.

Naomi's migration from her foster home into the world of modeling let her learn that she is not to be represented and treated as merely an object, and that her black female body can be in the same realm as the white female body.

-Amy Huang