Naomi Campbell's Fierce Fashion Posse
As we all know, fashion is what happens when people wear clothes. But fashion can be more than that. It can be a social movement, a transcendent event. It can be a little lightening on a summer's day. It can be the beginning of something beautiful, or an end to something awful. More than anything, it can be the foundation for forming a posse of select individuals who desire nothing more than to make you look good.
When Naomi Campbell celebrated 25 years in the fashion industry, she did so with a posse of young models dressed in tshirts bearing her likeness. Some might call that a manifestation of egomania and narcissim reaching dangerous levels, others call it good branding. The line between psychological disorder and marketing is becoming thinner and thinner these days, which should probably concern us more, you know, as a society.
That aside, Naomi had clearly drilled her minions in the importance of conformity, for they all looked suitably similar in their short shorts and red lipstick, and moreover, in the uniformity of their facial expressions. Save for one wee wench, who we can see on Naomi's right in this photo, shamelessly smiling along with the main woman herself, stealing focus with her shiny white teeth and ruby red lips. One can only hope that she was taken out after the picture was taken and whipped soundly for the offense.
The t-shirts the models were wearing were sold to befit appropriate charities. Not the actual tshirts the models were wearing, one supposes, but shirts very much like them, signed by Naomi Campbell herself.
We could all learn a lot from Naomi Campbell, who has broken ground in so many ways over the course of her career. First of all, along with other models of color, like Tyra Banks, she proved that black women are just as beautiful, if not more beautiful, than white women. She also went on to prove that it doesn't matter how horrid one's temper is as long as one is incredibly rich and really really good looking. After a series of assaults on her staff and unsuspecting passersby that would make a SWAT team blanch, Naomi briefly did community service at a department of sanitation, where she turned over several new leaves and quite a few tonnes of trash.
The moral of the story is however, that one can always be redeemed by fashion, and if in doubt, having a squad of lithe young models around oneself wearing one's face is always a good idea. If any of them should get out of line, a blackberry to the solar plexus generally does the trick.