A struggle fought on many fronts
August 6, 2009
by Betty Winston Bayé
Naomi Sims and Kathleen Cleaver both were born in the American South
in the 1940s. Both these women were gorgeous at extreme ends of the
black-is-beautiful color spectrum. Sims was dark-skinned and
brown-eyed. Cleaver is light-skinned and blue-eyed. The two women are
distinguished not just by their physical differences but also in the
path each chose in the 1960s, to wage war against racism and discrimination.
A child of the black middle-class, Cleaver married a "bad boy" named
Eldridge and joined the central committee of the feared Black Panther
Party. The Panthers fed the poor and directly confronted both the
police in poor communities and the mainstream political
establishment. The party emphasized self-defense, and the members' de
rigueur was wearing black leather jackets and black berets cocked to
the side over their Afros, and openly bearing arms. During that same
period Naomi Sims, who had a difficult childhood and even spent time
in foster care after her mother became ill, fought the good fights in
the world of high fashion. Her sidearms were beauty and tenacity.
I believe that we miss the mark in trying to understand the civil
rights movement when we define it only in its narrowest terms, when
what it was and what it remains is a multi-pronged sustained social
engagement. That thought came to mind when I read that Naomi Sims,
who was 61, had died this week of breast cancer. When I mentioned
Sims' passing to a younger colleague she said that she'd never of
her. At a time when America has a black President, and people of
color have ascended to heights in fields where once there were few to
none, it may be difficult, if you're not of a certain age, to realize
how really revolutionary it was 40 years ago for Life magazine to
feature Naomi on its cover.
Yale Joel's iconic image of Naomi, with her hair severely pulled back
into a pony tail that was wrapped around her neck, is one of two Sims
photographs to be included in "The Model as Muse," a current
exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Sims, who was born in Oxford, Miss., wasn't the first black
high-fashion model, but she broke the color barrier on runways around
the world. To be sure, at first her deep chocolate aesthetic wasn't
greatly appreciated. The powers of fashion had little faith, back
then, that showing their clothes on a tall, dark-skinned woman would
actually inspire their best customers to part with cash. But they
were wrong. Plus, what the modeling agents and designers didn't know
is that Naomi Sims was more than just a pretty face. She'd already
decided, she said, to become "somebody really important." But even
after Gosta Peterson's photo of Sims was chosen for the cover of The
New York Times' 1967 fashion supplement, Sims' phones didn't ring off
the hook. Her career took off when Wilhelmina Cooper, a former model,
shopped her photos on spec.
And yet, as hard as Sims fought to get into high fashion, she walked
away at the top of her game after just five years. She was 24, with
presumably many more good-money-making modeling years ahead of her.
However, as my mother used to say, "Pretty don't last always." Sims
realized that there was more to life than simply being a beautiful
clothes hanger.
"Modeling was never my ultimate goal," she said. "I started to model
to supplement my income to go to college... starting my own business
had always appealed to me, and I was fortunate that my first career
led to my second." Moreover, Sims also told another interviewer,
"There is nothing sadder than an old, broke model, and there are many
models who have nothing at the end of their career."
Actually, there's nothing sadder than an old broke anything.
In her second career, Sims became the ultimate entrepreneur. She
built a multi-million dollar beauty empire that included fragrances,
beauty salons and a line of cosmetics for women of color. Just as
Lena Horne had complained years earlier, Sims found the make-up
artists' standard toolboxes didn't included products that enhanced
black beauty. She also created her own wig collection because more
often than not the wigs she was given to model were of textures that
didn't remotely resemble black hair.
I've written this column to pay tribute to what, for some, may be a
little known black history fact. But I've written because I am
reminded once more of the time that a white teacher at one of
Jefferson County's alternative schools pulled me to the side and
asked me to share a special word with one of her students. The girl
was smart and had good potential, but even the white teacher realized
that the young black girl was being held back by low self-esteem,
largely because of her very dark skin.
When I took that precious child to the side, she looked at me with
the saddest eye and said that she'd never seen a dark-skinned woman
that she thought was beautiful or had done anything great. I wanted
to cry. That young girl obviously had never seen Naomi Sims. I write
this for her, and for the children that perhaps she has had by now. I
write this for a concerned teacher who may be struggling to inspire
students suffering low self-esteem because they don't look like
Beyoncé or Halle Berry. Somebody should tell them, as I often heard
when I was growing up, that beauty is as beauty does and that beauty
is skin-deep, but ugly is ugly to the bone.
I've written this remembering Michael Jackson. A megastar, he was
plagued by low self-esteem that some trace to his original dark
complexion and the fact that, when Michael was a boy, his father
teased him unmercifully about his big nose. What does a child do when
those who are supposed to love them unconditionally tease them about
things over which they have no control the size of their nose or
lips, the color of their skin, the texture of their hair? Isn't life
tough enough without that?
As for Naomi Sims, may she rest in peace, and I thank her, as perhaps
do many women of my generation, for waging the struggle her way.
--
Betty Bayé's columns appear Thursdays in the Community forum. Email
her at bbaye@courier-journal.com .
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Mirror, Mirror:
A black model who broke barriers
Aug. 5, 2009
By Elizabeth Wellington
Fashion Columnist
As a young girl making her way through New York's modeling industry
in the late 1970s, Cheryl Wadlington remembers meeting Naomi Sims,
America's first African American cover girl.
"She was wearing all white; it was her signature look," said
Wadlington, who, when she was a young model in New York, heard Sims
speak. Now she runs a fashion etiquette camp in Philadelphia for
teenage girls. Sims "wore a button-up top and a pair of exquisite
linen pants. She never was wrinkled and she had the most beautiful
chocolate skin. . . ."
At a time when black women were told they were too dark to even think
about being cover girls, Sims became the first to do so when she
landed the cover of Ladies' Home Journal in 1968. She died Saturday
of breast cancer at her home in Newark, N.J. She was 61.
Sims was one of the first models to become an entrepreneur. After a
five-year career as one of Halston's top models, she launched a wig
line and her own skin-care products. She also penned several books
about African American beauty, including one of the most popular, How
to Be a Top Model (Doubleday, 1979).
"She represented elegance, dignity, and beauty when her kind of
beauty was not the standard," said Vogue editor Andre Leon Talley,
who last saw Sims in May at Oprah Winfrey's Legends Ball. As a
teenager, Talley had taped to his bedroom wall a photograph of Sims
on the cover of Life magazine in 1969. "She broke all the barriers
being a dark-skinned woman without light features."
In style circles, she was a heavy hitter.
"She was the Jackie Robinson of the fashion world," said Tina King,
president of the Philadelphia chapter of the National Association of
Fashion and Accessory Designers, a historically black fashion group.
It was as if she represented the beauty side of the black-power
movement, King said.
Her combination of lean long limbs with chiseled features and hair
pulled back is a familiar image, even if you can't quite place it.
It's a look that's elegant and graceful, focusing on natural beauty.
This was the prototype for the exotic, fashionable, high-powered '80s
black woman - one that finally edged out the stereotypical Aunt
Jemima look. Think Essence editor Susan Taylor without the braids.
Perhaps without Sims, we wouldn't have the exotic, dark-skinned
supermodel Alek Wek or the beauty-with-business-sense combo of Tyra
Banks. But for everyday women, Sims looked like the classy femme
fatale next door, and even served as inspiration for the
sophisticated style of Dynasty diva Diahann Carroll and the
post-Supremes Diana Ross.
Philadelphia's Sessilee Lopez, a regular at New York Fashion Week who
shared pages with Sims in Italian Vogue's black issue in August, has
a look that mirrors her predecessor: sleek hair, high cheekbones, full lips.
"When I saw her, I saw a woman who looked like me, like my
neighbors," said former fashion journalist Vanessa Lloyd Sgambati,
who covered Sims on the Milan runways at the peak of her career.
"People would look at her in awe. . . . Her beauty was a natural
beauty, a beauty that you would never find today."
Sims was born in Oxford, Miss., grew up as a foster child in
Pittsburgh, and moved as a young adult to New York to attend the
Fashion Institute of Technology. She wanted to be a model, but she
repeatedly had doors slammed in her face. She kept trying and
eventually called Gosta Peterson, a fashion photographer for the New
York Times, and asked that they work together. That led to her
landing a cover spot on the new Fashion of the Times supplement in 1967.
Ladies' Home Journal followed, and Life came after.
After five years of modeling, she quit and started her own
businesses. The idea was to lift the spirit of African American women
from the inside. She stayed true to her message of black empowerment,
turning down the title role in Cleopatra Jones (1973) because of the
way the movie portrayed black people. (The role went to Tamara Dobson.)
"There were other black models, yes, like Dorothea Towles Church in
Paris and Vogue's Donyale Luna," Talley said. "But she was a trailblazer."
--
Contact fashion writer Elizabeth Wellington at 215- 854-2704 or
ewellington@phillynews.com.
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