On the same day she graduated from Westinghouse High School in
Pittsburgh, Naomi Sims set out for Manhattan, leaving behind a city
where she never felt as if she belonged. She was like many New York
aspirants — creative, ambitious, an escapee from somewhere too small
and stifling. Except that her sense of isolation, in the place she
left, was extreme. What Naomi Sims would soon experience was a newly
arrived New Yorker’s fairy tale: extraordinary and nearly instant
success.
Living with an older sister in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and attending the Fashion Institute of Technology, she found herself short on money and decided to try modeling. Without an agency to represent her, she cannily cultivated relationships with photographers and other figures in the fashion industry and, at 19, graced the cover of the August 1967 issue of Fashions of the Times, a supplement to The New York Times Magazine. The next year, she appeared on the cover of Ladies Home Journal — the first black model to be featured on the front of a mainstream women’s magazine.
Nearly six feet tall, with ebony skin and African features, Sims was regal in carriage and intuitive in her sense of style. She projected the rare and alluring combination of sultriness and rectitude. She walked everywhere in Manhattan, and her leggy strides once were described as “enough to sizzle the sidewalks on a cold day.” In 1973, she married the art dealer Michael Findlay and lived in an apartment filled with classical music and fresh flowers. Findlay told me about first meeting her at a party where Timothy Leary was wooing her. “She dissuaded him in a charming but definitive way,” he said. “With such aplomb.”
Such outward self-assurance gave no hint of Sims’s painful upbringing. Her mother, separated from Naomi’s father shortly after her birth, gave her up when she was about 10. Naomi spent time in a group home and then was raised as a foster child by a working-class black couple in Pittsburgh’s Homewood section. She would later recall that a younger foster daughter in the house, lighter in skin tone, was treated “like a daughter” while she felt more like a helper. Naomi’s mother lived about a mile away, where she raised Naomi’s two older sisters. (Why her mother gave her up remains unclear.)
Sims landed in New York at a cultural moment when the city’s aesthetic arbiters were ready to embrace her alongside the doe-eyed frailness of blondes like Twiggy, who came to New York at about the same time. Andy Warhol befriended her, and she was among the crowd at the Factory and Studio 54, but not every night. Sims was known within her industry as someone who showed up on time and prepared, usually having already done her own hair and makeup because few stylists knew how to work with a black woman. CONTINUE READING...
