No one carried Boy George's purse when he reported for duty. And whereas he came off looking stout and balding and pathetic and lost, Campbell gives the impression not just that the whole public service thing was her idea, but also that the show doesn't stop when you step off the catwalk. Glamour is a lifelong loop.
"She's kind of like a dream person," said the designer Anna Sui, whose working relationship with the model goes back more than a decade. Her appeal is magical to some, Sui said, because she seems to "embody what a glamorous person is supposed to be, someone who knows everyone, who gets the loudest applause when she walks through a door."
Naturally you might think otherwise if Campbell had ever thrown a phone at your head or staged one of her legendary tantrums, the baby voice transforming itself into a demonic croak right out of The Exorcist.
You might not find her so bewitching if you had ever sat for eight hours on a photographic set awaiting her arrival. You might not necessarily fall for the charms of the woman who has been referred to as a black Bardot or an African Marilyn or a Josephine Baker for our era. But then you would be in a minority.
"The thing is, Naomi truly represents fashion," said Bethann Hardison, a onetime model and agent, who has for years acted as Campbell's adviser. Actually, Campbell represents something more potent than that, some quality that never seems to go out of vogue. She has moxie, of a sort that only people whose molecules are arranged as perfectly as hers are able to claim. Beauty operates according to its own rules. Everybody knows that.
And that is why, when a lot of people might, as Hardison noted, "run and hide and pull their tail between their legs if they'd been boohooed" and suffered a highly public humiliation, Campbell has taken another route, "brushing her shoulders off and stepping in style."
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