Naomi Campbell

She was 15, hanging around Covent Garden after school, when a scout spotted her. By 1988, she was on the cover of French Vogue only after Yves Saint Laurent threatened to pull his advertising if the magazine didn't put her there. When Dolce & Gabbana wouldn't book her, fellow supermodels Christy Turlington and Linda Evangelista reportedly told them: "If you don't use Naomi, you don't get us." That's what it took. She became one of the Big Six who turned modeling into pop culture and sealed the era in George Michael's Freedom! '90 video.

In 2024, the V&A Museum opened the first major retrospective dedicated to a fashion model. The same year, the UK Charity Commission banned her from running charities for five years after finding that only 8.5% of Fashion for Relief's expenditure went to actual charitable grants between 2016 and 2022, while luxury hotels, spa treatments, and personal security for Campbell absorbed the rest. She's fighting the ban in court, claiming a fellow trustee set up a fake email account to impersonate her. The retrospective and the inquiry landed the same summer.

Before modeling, she appeared in music videos for Bob Marley and Culture Club as a child, training at Italia Conti school in London. The assault charges are part of the public record: she was convicted four times between 1998 and 2009, most famously for throwing a jewel-encrusted BlackBerry at her housekeeper in 2006 over a missing pair of jeans. That earned her five days of community service at a New York City sanitation facility. The model who broke color barriers on Vogue covers served her sentence at a city sanitation garage in Manhattan.