Over the past few years, Naomi Campbell has added too many new strings to her bow to list here. The ones that have come most in handy for us all, however, are her newfound roles as a vigilante public health activist and clairvoyant. Cast your mind back to July 2019, if you can, and you’ll remember that video of the supermodel wiping down every inch of her aeroplane seat with Dettol. “Clean everything you touch,” she commanded. “This is what I do on every plane I get on. I do not care what people think of me, it’s my health and it makes me feel better.” Roughly twelve months after coronavirus first began to spread around the world on — you guessed it — aeroplanes, we only wish we all had her foresight.
Flash forward to March of this year, when global governments were still dithering over whether on not we should all be wearing masks, and Naomi again offered us an insight into a future only she had seen, pitching up to LAX in a full Tyvek hazmat suit. Silly as it may have seemed at the time, with the gift of hindsight, few can argue that it was anything less than a tens-across-the-board COVID-era look. And nobody agrees more than Bath’s Fashion Museum, who have acquired the supermodel’s corona-safe catsuit for its collection.
“‘Really?!’ Why would they want that?” was her initial reaction to the request, Naomi told The Wall Street Journal. Anyone fretting over how she’ll keep safe without her protective gear needn’t worry though — she now has them delivered on a rolling subscription from Amazon, proving the naysayers who first accused her of pilfering hospital PPE supplies wrong. “‘They were acting like I was sneaking into Manhattan and going to the hospitals and stealing their supply,” she says. “That’s how I felt when I was reading it. So I started answering back, saying: ‘I got it on Amazon! I bought it fair and square on the internet.’”
Fashion fans will also be gagged to hear that the impulse to wear the suit was not, at first, Naomi’s own. “Linda Evangelista was very insightful and said [to] get them,” she reveals, only further justifying the look’s entrance into fashion’s hall of fame.