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Dorothea Church
Dorothea Towles in Paris, from 1949
The starting point for Black models in European couture. Towles went to Paris in 1949, where Christian Dior hired her to stand in for one of his regular models, and she spent about five years in France modeling for houses including Jacques Fath, Elsa Schiaparelli and Pierre Balmain. She is often cited as the first Black model to work with the top French designers, a claim best read as "first widely recorded," since earlier names may simply be lost.
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China Machado
Born
China Machado in Harper's Bazaar, February 1959
Machado broke the color line at a major American fashion magazine when Richard Avedon's photographs of her ran in the February 1959 issue of Harper's Bazaar. The publisher had balked at printing them, and Avedon pushed them through. Some accounts call it a cover; the safer description is that she was the first nonwhite model featured in the pages of Harper's Bazaar. Her career then ran the other way across the desk: she later worked as an editor at Bazaar, which makes her story about who gets to decide as much as who gets photographed.
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Donyale Luna
Born
Donyale Luna on British Vogue, March 1966
David Bailey photographed Luna for the March 1966 cover of British Vogue, the first time any edition of Vogue put a Black model on its cover. It came eight years before American Vogue did the same, which is why Beverly Johnson's later first is always qualified as American. A year earlier Harper's Bazaar had run a sketch of her on its cover rather than a photograph, so the Vogue image is the milestone that counts. Bailey's shot partly obscures her face, and her elongated, otherworldly look became one of the defining images of 1960s fashion.
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Naomi Sims
Born
Naomi Sims on Ladies' Home Journal, November 1968
Sims took Black beauty off the fashion pages and into the mainstream American household magazine. Her November 1968 Ladies' Home Journal cover was followed by Life in 1969 and Cosmopolitan in 1973, a run that showed publishers a Black cover star could sell to a general readership. What makes her more than a cover count is what came next: she retired from modeling in 1973 and built a beauty products range for Black women, turning the gap she had experienced as a model into a business.
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Beverly Johnson
Born
Beverly Johnson on American Vogue, August 1974
The milestone most people mean when they talk about Black models and Vogue. Johnson's August 1974 cover, shot by Francesco Scavullo, made her the first Black woman on the cover of American Vogue, and she went on to become the first Black woman to appear solo on the cover of French Elle, a cover dated 1975 in some accounts and 1977 in others. Two firsts at two of the most influential titles within a few years turned her from a single breakthrough into proof of demand, and made it harder for editors to treat the 1974 cover as a one-off.
More about Beverly Johnson6
Tracey Norman
Born
Tracey "Africa" Norman on the Clairol box, 1975, and again in 2016
In 1975 Norman's face went on the front of a Clairol hair dye box, Dark Auburn shade 512, and stayed there for six years. Nobody at the company knew she was transgender, and when she was outed on a magazine shoot her career ended almost overnight. That is the honest shape of this first: a Black trans model succeeded at the top of mass-market beauty, then was pushed out for who she was. The ending was partly rewritten in 2016, when Clairol brought her back for its Nice 'n Easy "Color As Real As You Are" campaign.
More about Tracey Norman7
Naomi Campbell
Born
Naomi Campbell on Vogue Paris, 1988
Campbell's fame can bury the specific door she opened. In 1988, at 18, she became the first Black model on the cover of Vogue Paris, now Vogue France, fourteen years after Beverly Johnson's American Vogue first and more than twenty after Donyale Luna's British one. She has credited the support of Yves Saint Laurent and the Black models who came before her. The cover belongs here because Paris was the last of those three editions to move, a clear sign of how unevenly these barriers fell from one country to the next.
More about Naomi Campbell8
Emme (model)
Born
Emme in People's 50 Most Beautiful, 1994, and as a Revlon spokesmodel
Emme is widely considered the first full-figured supermodel, and she got there when most companies would not book a model above a size 6. People named her to its 50 Most Beautiful list in 1994 and again in 1999, and in 1998 Revlon made her the first plus-size model to serve as its spokesperson. A celebrity beauty list and a cosmetics contract were exactly the places larger women had been missing. Fittingly, she has said she never liked the term plus-size and hopes models will one day be known by name alone.
More about Emme (model)9
Tyra Banks
Born
Tyra Banks on the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit cover, 1997
Banks had shared the 1996 Swimsuit Issue cover with Valeria Mazza, but in 1997 she became the first Black woman to land a solo cover, shot in Harbour Island in the Bahamas. The Swimsuit Issue reaches far beyond fashion's own readership, so a solo Black cover star there changed what a mass American audience saw as the default beauty. She came out of retirement for the 2019 cover, and has said she never thought the 1997 milestone was possible when she started out.
More about Tyra Banks10
Alek Wek
Born
Alek Wek on the cover of Elle, November 1997
Wek, who fled Sudan's civil war as a child and was scouted at an outdoor market in Crystal Palace, London, in 1995, is widely cited as the first African model on the cover of Elle. Gilles Bensimon shot her in white against white for the November 1997 issue of American Elle, and the cover drew a flood of positive reader mail alongside some hostile letters. Her dark skin and close-cropped hair were the opposite of the era's commercial ideal, so the milestone was less about a first face than a first look: it proved a model need not be lightened, styled or softened to sell a magazine.
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Liu Wen (model)
Liu Wen at Victoria's Secret, 2009, and Estée Lauder, 2010
Liu Wen marks the moment global beauty brands began casting for Asian consumers rather than around them. In 2009 she became the first Chinese model to walk the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, and in 2010 Estée Lauder named her its first Asian face. Some accounts widen the runway first to Asian models generally; the narrower Chinese wording is the safer one. Either way, a Chinese model fronting a heritage American cosmetics house signaled that the industry's idea of a global face was changing.
More about Liu Wen (model)12
Jillian Mercado
Born
Jillian Mercado in Diesel's "We Are Connected" campaign, 2014
Mercado was working as a fashion editor and blogger when Nicola Formichetti chose her for Diesel's campaign, which launched in January 2014. She has spastic muscular dystrophy and has used a wheelchair since she was 12, and the campaign's point was that anyone, whatever their body, could wear the brand. A contract with IMG Models followed in 2015, which is why her case matters: a disabled model moved from a single inclusive casting to ongoing representation at a major agency.
More about Jillian Mercado13
Madeline Stuart
Born
Madeline Stuart at New York Fashion Week, September 13, 2015
Stuart, then 18 and from Brisbane, walked for FTL Moda at Vanderbilt Hall in Grand Central Terminal on September 13, 2015. She was not the first person with Down syndrome on a New York runway that year, since the actress Jamie Brewer had walked in February, and an honest list should say so. Her distinction is different and arguably more durable: she has been described as the first professional adult model with Down syndrome, turning a debut that could have been a feel-good one-off into a working career.
More about Madeline Stuart14
Ashley Graham (model)
Born
Ashley Graham on the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit cover, February 2016
Graham, a size 16, became the first plus-size model on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue in February 2016, one of three cover stars that year. A year earlier she had appeared in the same issue only in a swimwear advertisement, so the move from ad pages to cover is the barrier in miniature. She followed it with British Vogue's January 2017 cover, reported as that edition's first plus-size cover star. Landing both a mass-market swimsuit cover and a Vogue cover within a year made it hard for anyone to call curvier models a niche.
More about Ashley Graham (model)15
Halima Aden
Born
Halima Aden, from Miss Minnesota USA in 2016 to Sports Illustrated Swimsuit in 2019
Aden's firsts form a chain, each one in a setting that had never made room for a hijab. At 19 she was the first woman to wear one in the Miss Minnesota USA pageant, reaching the semifinals; she then signed with IMG Models, described as the first hijab-wearing model signed to a major agency; and in 2019 she became the first model to wear a hijab and burkini in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, shot at Watamu Beach in Kenya, the country where she was born. The sequence shows modest dress being accepted on its own terms, not styled away.
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Valentina Sampaio
Born
Valentina Sampaio on Vogue Paris, 2017, at Victoria's Secret, 2019, and in Sports Illustrated, 2020
Sampaio, from a fishing village in northeastern Brazil, became the first trans woman on the cover of Vogue Paris in 2017. In 2019 she was the first openly transgender model hired by Victoria's Secret, a brand that had long sold one narrow idea of femininity, and in 2020 she became the first trans woman featured in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. Some outlets called that a cover; it was an inside feature. Three firsts at a fashion title, a lingerie giant and a mass-market magazine make her the clearest single case of trans women moving into the mainstream.
More about Valentina Sampaio17
Maye Musk
Born
Maye Musk as a CoverGirl ambassador, September 2017
Age is the barrier fashion talks about least, and Musk is its most visible breach. In September 2017, at 69 and after about 50 years of modeling, she was named a CoverGirl ambassador and described as the oldest model to star in one of the brand's campaigns. She fronted the CoverGirl + Olay Simply Ageless range, aimed at women over 40, which is the point: a beauty company selling to older women chose to show one. In 2022, at 74, Maye Musk became the oldest cover model in the history of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, a title built on youth.
More about Maye Musk18
Aariana Rose Philip
Born
Aariana Rose Philip signing with Elite Model Management, September 2018
Philip, who signed under the name Aaron Philip, was a 17-year-old from the Bronx when Elite New York took her on in 2018, its first model who is Black, transgender and disabled. She has cerebral palsy and uses a motorized wheelchair, and she built her following on Twitter before any agency called. Her agent said she would be available for shows in New York, London, Paris and Milan, which is what separates a signing from a gesture: full representation for the main fashion capitals, not a single inclusive shoot.
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Winnie Harlow
Born
Winnie Harlow on the Victoria's Secret runway, November 8, 2018
Harlow, who has the skin condition vitiligo, first drew attention on America's Next Top Model in 2014. On November 8, 2018, at Pier 94 in New York, she became the first model with vitiligo to walk the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, more than two decades into the show's run. Her career matters because the condition was never treated as a quirk to be retouched or a theme for one campaign: she has worked as a mainstream model whose skin is simply part of her look, the kind of normalization a one-off booking never delivers.
More about Winnie Harlow20
Ellie Goldstein
Born
Ellie Goldstein for Gucci Beauty in Vogue Italia, July 2020
Goldstein, then 18 and from Essex in England, became the first model with Down syndrome to pose for Gucci Beauty, fronting its L'Obscur mascara in a shoot that ran with Vogue Italia. She is represented by Zebedee Management, an agency that works with disabled and other underrepresented models, and had already worked for Nike, Superdrug and Vodafone. The shoot belonged to Gucci Beauty's "Unconventional Beauty" series, and it answered the old casting excuse that customers want only one kind of face: a luxury house put a model with Down syndrome at the center of a beauty campaign.
More about Ellie Goldstein21
Leyna Bloom
Leyna Bloom on the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit cover, July 2021
Bloom, a Chicago native, took the Swimsuit Issue one step past Valentina Sampaio. In March 2021 she became the first transgender woman of color featured in its pages, and on July 19, 2021, she was revealed as one of the year's cover stars alongside Megan Thee Stallion and Naomi Osaka, the first transgender cover star in the issue's history. Sharing the cover with a chart-topping rapper and a tennis champion placed a trans model among the year's defining public figures rather than in a special feature set apart from them.
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