“Do the Naomi Campbell Walk”

the constitution of the Black supermodel and the discourses on ethnic-racial diversity in the fashion industry

Abstract

This article analyzes how media discourses produce and stabilize a position of subjectivity for the figure of Naomi Campbell in the field of fashion, conceiving her not as an empirical individual, but as a subjectivity of a Black supermodel constituted by discursive practices traversed by relations of knowledge, power, and resistance. Based on eight journalistic articles selected from widely circulated national and international portals, such as Harper’s Bazaar, L’Officiel, Veja, Estadão, BBC, and Forbes, we treat these texts as discursive materialities that participate in the constitution of the supermodel as an object of knowledge and a subject of enunciation in the fashion industry. Anchored in French-tradition Discourse Analysis and the Foucauldian perspective on discourses, we examine the effects of meaning that operate, on this racialized body, processes of objectification and subjectification, as well as the ways in which her discursive position is invested with authority, legitimacy, and the capacity for political intervention in the sphere of fashion. The results show that the subjectivity surrounding Naomi is constructed in and by media discourses as that of an exceptional body, endowed with the power to displace norms and challenge historically consolidated regimes of visibility. We demonstrate that the meanings of diversity associated with her presence on the catwalk do not stem solely from her professional trajectory, but from a discursive position that reconfigures what can be seen, said, and recognized as legitimate concerning Black bodies in fashion – even though these discursive disputes are marked by tensions and controversies. Thus, we argue that the discursive centrality attributed to Naomi Campbell functions as a device that reinscribes social practices, alters the modes of circulation of the gaze, and opens new conditions of possibility for the existence and projection of Black models in the present and the future.