Naomi Campbell is perhaps the world’s most famous supermodel, an unparalleled beauty whose occasional diva antics give the normal activities of life a dangerous, glamorous edge.
When she pleaded guilty to throwing her Blackberry at her former housekeeper in 2007, for example, she did her court-ordered community service with the Sanitation Department in New York in a wardrobe of Etro and Louboutin shoes. She then recounted her experience in an as-told-to cover story for W magazine, accompanied by Steven Klein photographs of her coming and going from the sanitation garage. When she completed her five days of service, a spokesman for the department told the reporters crowded outside: “She was assigned to sweeping the floors in the garage…. From what I understand, she was interacting with her co-workers, shit-shotting with them, and everything went along well.”
Now Campbell has returned to enchant the world with her completion of totally normal tasks on her YouTube channel—in a series named, more accurately than you might think, #BeingNaomi. Last week, she got on a plane—“I love being in the air. I love being everywhere and nowhere at the same time”—and went through a magically line-free security area, bought a bag of candy, and then put on plastic gloves and wiped down “everything you possibly touch.” Nearly one million people have watched this video since it was posted.
Yesterday, she spent over four minutes choosing pears, olives, and non-dairy yogurts at the Tribeca Whole Foods. “I need to do my own groceries,” she says. “I can’t order them online…I need to choose my own fruit. I need to see it with my own eyes.” Almost half a million people have watched this already. Including me! Why? Because the idea of a person who seems to move above the rest of the world, at a celestial level of ease, doing things that we ourselves do, is the ultimate kind of dissonance? Or because too-online chumps will watch anything when the world is on fire? Maybe both!
One of the Great Women’s Handbags Is Now Available for Guys
It-bags are basically a men’s thing now—a phenomenon made more official this week with the release of Fendi’s Baguette for men, created in collaboration with Japanese bag brand Porter. The house took their most iconic handbag—the Baguette, perhaps most famous as practically the fifth character on Sex and the City—and pumped it up and made it into a cross-body bag. It’s available online now.
Headline of the Year: “Watch this Brazen Tagger Desecrate Louis Vuitton Logo on Ludlow Street
