Nearly three decades later, most of that famous posse is no longer actively modelling, except Campbell, 49. Defying conventional wisdom that a model’s career is as brief as an NFL running back’s, she posed not long ago for another Versace campaign alongside Kaia Gerber, the teen daughter of Campbell’s friend Cindy Crawford. This summer, Campbell booked her first Calvin Klein campaign, posing in underwear for images that were splashed all over the internet, 27 years after her friend Kate Moss shot to fame in Calvin Klein skivvies. She has Bezos on speed-dial – she appears in and is a consulting producer for Making the Cut, a fashion series premiering on Amazon Prime Video in 2020. She also has her own YouTube channel, Being Naomi, where some videos have clocked over one million views, or more than tune in for The CW’s Dynasty reboot. She has over three million more Instagram followers than Crawford and nearly seven million more than Turlington. And despite Campbell’s now-sober approach to life—she rarely drinks even caffeine and has quit nicotine in favour of mango-flavoured vaping – she continues to be a magnet for tabloid headlines and paparazzi. If you want to know what Naomi Campbell wore two days ago, log onto the Daily Mail’s website, which reports on her with a fervour typically reserved for the Kardashians. (On one recent Sunday: a red leather jumpsuit.)

“I’m a survivor,” says Campbell, sipping coffee with almond milk to power through a rare 24-hour stopover in New York, where she lives, though she just laughs when asked how many days she stays here. “I don’t have a squeaky-clean life, and I don’t pretend to. I was the first to say that I was an addict, and I’m so grateful to God to be a recovering addict and a recovering alcoholic.” Every night before bed and every morning before drinking her daily dose of celery juice, she kneels to say Psalm 91: “I will say of the Lord, ‘He is my refuge…’ No evil shall befall you.”

During one 30-day span this summer, Campbell flew an itinerary that would make even Jules Verne dizzy: from Paris to New York to Tokyo to Senegal, back to Paris to Sicily to Austria to the South of France—nearly 24,000 miles, which is almost the circumference of the earth—to shoot a Brazilian Vogue cover, attend the SEED Project’s annual Hoop Forum and hit Google Camp with Leonardo DiCaprio, Katy Perry and Prince Harry. In September, she staged her Fashion for Relief charity fashion show in London, and this December she’ll receive the British Fashion Council’s Fashion Icon award. She has surpassed Kevin Bacon in the celebrity version of six degrees of separation: If you want to find the shortest route from Gabby Giffords to Queen Rania of Jordan to Beyoncé, Naomi Campbell is the link.

“She is connected to everybody. She can call on anyone when she needs help,” says Evangelista, whose own close friendship with Campbell was forged in the crucible of ’90s fashion, when models trumped celebrities on magazine covers. She calls Campbell by her nickname, Omi, and speaks to her nearly every week, either by phone or on what must be fashion’s most exclusive group chat, which includes Turlington, Steven Meisel, Marc Jacobs, Pat McGrath, François Nars and Anna Sui.

“Naomi sweeps you into her world – one minute you are in London, next minute you are in India, next minute you could be in Africa. It’s a whirlwind,” says another member of that group chat, Edward Enninful, the editor in chief of British Vogue, who met her when he was a 19-year-old fashion director for i-D magazine. The day of their first shoot, she invited him to hop on a private jet to Dublin with her. Enninful, who named Campbell a Vogue contributing editor in 2017, describes her as having the mystique of an old Hollywood star such as Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich. “Naomi came up at a time when models had to really learn their craft, almost like a studio system,” he says. “Apart from being incredibly ambitious, she is incredibly focused. Naomi loves being a model. When you shoot her, you realise there are only a handful of models who can give what she can. It’s just this magic.”

Campbell intuitively understands the value of being an enigma, and has a tactical self-awareness shared by movie stars and career politicians. “The good thing with me is that you’d see me and you wouldn’t see me: I’d appear and I’d disappear,” says Campbell of her long career. “Traveling has saved my life in a certain way – I keep it very limited to who knows what [I’m doing] and where I’m going.”

It’s also easy to discount the power of a model’s personality – they are often seen as speechless mannequins in still photographs – but the force of Campbell’s has become part of her persona. She toggles effortlessly between a kittenish warmth, all sweetness and doe eyes, and a flinty gravitas. “If Naomi wasn’t modelling,” says Enninful, “she could run a small country. She has that thing, like most black people in any industry: You have to fight twice as hard. She’s always been fighting, but now even more.”

Ask Campbell if she thinks people are afraid of her, and she’ll say, “Maybe.” Take the story she has told about a time when she was a little girl and a boy hit her. Rather than running to tattle, she hit back.

Born in Streatham, South London, she was raised by her professional-dancer mother, Valerie Morris-Campbell, who had emigrated to the UK from Jamaica in the 1950s. Campbell’s father is unnamed on her birth certificate – he left her mother when she was four months pregnant – and Campbell did not meet him until she was 41, five months before he died.

Campbell herself began working when she was 7, first appearing in a music video for Bob Marley, and has always had a Fanny Brice–like determination to perform under the bright lights, front and centre. “I only push myself because I know I can,” Campbell says. “I say I’m exhausted, but as soon as you put me in front of that camera, it’s gone.”

“Naomi was always very forthright at a very young age,” says Lisa Vanderpump, of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills fame, who as a teenager met an 8-year-old Naomi when they were both cast on the 1979 British television show Kids. “She’s a little spitfire,” Vanderpump remembers thinking. She still sees Campbell occasionally.

Campbell’s persistence might have been learned from watching her mother, who took frequent traveling jobs to pay for her daughter’s theatre school tuition. “Once she accepted that I was going to be in [the modelling] business, she made it quite clear you have to best a lot of people,” says Campbell, who recalls her mother telling her when she was scouted at 15, “And what makes you so special? You need to give more than just what you think you’re going to give.”

At least she could rely on her talent and nerve: As a 16-year-old arriving in New York City for the first time, she headed straight off the Concorde to a Manhattan studio for a shoot with Meisel. She climbed into a pouf-skirted party dress and danced, tossing a waist-length ponytail with brio.

“She was super, super shy,” Meisel says, over the telephone, of Campbell. “But she got up there and performed like the best – like she had been doing it for a thousand years.” These shots appeared in American Vogue in February 1987, meaning that Campbell arrived at the magazine before its current long-standing editor, Anna Wintour.

The new star was soon dubbed Bambi for her fawn-like legs, whispery voice and big, long-lashed eyes. “She had this kind of breathy little voice, but the second the camera turned on or she was going down the runway, she was a pro,” says Anna Sui, who became a close friend during that era and frequently made custom pieces for Campbell, such as one risqué design she created for the fall 1992 season. “There’s no one else who walks like her—who else could wear backless chaps, with a butterfly on the behind?”

Campbell refers to Sui and Meisel, among others, as her “chosen family,” a self-selected group that also included Azzedine Alaïa, who became a father figure. The designer’s 2017 death shook her deeply – they had been close since she was 16. After a chance meeting in Paris when her purse had been stolen, she stayed at his house often, calling him Papa and treating him like one, too: sneaking out the window to go clubbing at night, only to have him turn up and drag her home. Even now, she bursts into tears at the mention of his name. (She also has a half-brother, Pierre Blackwood, 16 years her junior.)

Another parental figure came in the form of the late South African president Nelson Mandela, whom she calls Granddad. He began inviting her regularly to South Africa in the ’90s – he would call her and she would drop everything to go. “He took me to children’s hospitals, schools. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I felt a sense of peace doing it. I was just a kid jumping around in the playground with the kids,” says Campbell. “I didn’t quite understand it when I was younger, but I’ve got an understanding of it now. It made me feel like I had a sense of purpose in my life.”

Around the same time, her career took off, but despite achievements like being the first black model on the cover of September Vogue, in 1989, and on the cover of Time, in 1991, Campbell says she has been remunerated less than her white peers throughout her career.

“I don’t want models of diversity to have to wait as long as I did [for pay equity],” says Campbell. Besides mentoring the next generation of models, like South Sudanese – born Adut Akech (“I used to make sure she would come over to the apartment; I wanted to make sure she was eating,” says Campbell), she confers frequently with a group of informal advisers, including former model, agent and activist Bethann Hardison, longtime Vogue contributing editor André Leon Talley, music executive Steve Stoute and Enninful. Hardison co-founded the Diversity Coalition (Campbell is also a member), aimed at the modeling industry. They keep tabs on who they think isn’t truly supporting diversity.

“Naomi was the first black model who really changed the common perception of black beauty and has always felt the responsibility of her role,” says Valentino designer Pierpaolo Piccioli, who recently enlisted Campbell for the Valentino pre-fall 2019 ad campaign and to close the spring 2019 haute couture show (he also designed her custom-made ensemble for this year’s Met Gala). “After having faced a lot of resistance and discrimination at the beginning of her career, she is a total winner today, but has never forgot the experience and wants every black model to be safe from that.”

This year, for example, Campbell turned down an offer to appear in a fashion show in Paris in March featuring an all-black cast.

“I can’t say what I’m saying and go the other way. No amount of money will allow me to do that,” says Campbell. “I had to say I’m really sorry, it’s not about the numbers, it’s about my integrity at this point of what I have been saying. I’d be a complete hypocrite. I can’t sell out.”

“A black woman: It wasn’t easy then or now to survive,” says Meisel. “But she surpassed everybody.”

“I’ve not expected anything to ever be easy,” says Campbell. “I love underdogs because I’ve been an underdog for so many years. My whole life’s been challenged. I’ve been told so many noes and not possibles. The noes helped me to build a stronger resilience.”

Her recent career rebound comes after a turbulent decade that saw Campbell plead guilty to assault three times and undergo court-mandated anger-management courses, including in 2007 for injuring a former housekeeper with a cellphone. She also got entangled in the 2010 war crimes trial of former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor owing to a gift of uncut diamonds his staff delivered to her. Testifying at The Hague, she channeled film-star hauteur with such aplomb that a snippet of the court proceeding is included in a fan-created online video compilation titled “Naomi Campbell being shady AF.” Even the Jeffrey Epstein scandal managed to embroil her, thanks to paparazzi photos of a 31st birthday party thrown by then-boyfriend Flavio Briatore, which Epstein attended. (Commenting via YouTube, Campbell has called Epstein’s crimes “indefensible.”)

“Naomi has 11 lives,” says Hardison. “It’s like Tolstoy stuff, War and Peace. These are big chapters – it’s one of those books that you pick up and it is thick.”

In the current chapter, Campbell is in Africa at least once a month, lending her fame to a wide range of projects, such as Arise Fashion Week in Lagos, Nigeria, which promotes African designers, or an early learning centre sponsored by Save the Children at a camp for Syrian refugees. She also encourages brands like Gucci, where she sits on a diversity advisory board, to invest in Africa, connecting them directly with universities in Ghana, South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria to recruit promising students. She chastises brands that refer to themselves as global but aren’t yet in Africa. “I’m like, You’re not global, you’re international,” she says. “You can’t be global if you leave out an entire continent.” Her own Fashion for Relief initiative has raised funds to combat poverty and Ebola in Africa.

“I realise [now] what I am supposed to do in Africa: to use myself to help get this continent to where it should be. No more ‘poor Africa’ stuff,” she says.

Her YouTube channel, which launched in November 2018, has become a forum for her to share memories of Mandela and her relationship with her mother, with whom she recently modelled in a Burberry campaign. There are also unguarded moments like a recent post explaining one of her signature travel tricks – donning gloves to disinfect her entire plane seat—that garnered over 1.75 million views. “I like that I have ownership of my content,” she says. “There’s no point at this stage in my life to just be working for someone else.” (She gets a percentage of ad sales based on her viewership.) “I’ve been asked constantly to do a documentary. People say, We’ll give you a small fee. It’s like, You think I’m stupid? I know what my life is. I know that it’s been very colourful. It’s like, I’m going to give it away? No.”

YouTube’s chief business officer, Robert Kyncl, says Campbell’s channel has exceeded expectations. “It’s not what everyone knows Naomi as from the last few decades,” he says, pointing out that she is also bolstering YouTube’s attempts to conquer the fashion and beauty industries. “Naomi can be a wonderful bridge to that; [she]brings new users to YouTube and helps the overall ecosystem.”

“Naomi is amongst that rarefied group of people that you sense would be the best at whatever they choose to do in life,” says Jony Ive, her friend and the departing chief design officer of Apple.

Ive, like many others, keeps in touch with Campbell via texts and phone calls—her iPhone is never out of reach. “Being alone doesn’t mean you are lonely,” she says. “I don’t have time to be bored, and I don’t have time to be lonely.”

In keeping with her peripatetic lifestyle, she says she’s not attached to material objects, even the emerald rings or gold chains with tiny diamonds she wears. “If I lose something I look at it as it was meant to be gone. Don’t look for it. It was meant to leave,” she says. “I believe if things fall off me,” such as an earring, “and I find it, I don’t put it back on my body.” Similarly, Campbell says she is careful about what she wears in the first place. “I’m very superstitious when someone gives me something to put on my body. I look at the reason behind it.”

She’s also circumspect about relationships: After decades of dating high-profile men, she is taking it slow. “For me, privacy is important to know each other, and I always worry that my job will not allow that,” she says. “But I have ways. I was taught that by Robert De Niro,” whom she dated in the early ’90s.

As for children, she says, “Not yet—I’ll see what the universe brings me.” For now, what the universe has delivered is very much in the spirit of a “chosen family.” Adut Akech, the young model, calls her Mama, and she considers herself responsible for many of the children she meets through her philanthropic work.

In the meantime, Campbell has to go to Rwanda and Morocco for charity commitments, back to Asia for Making the Cut and Italy for fashion shoots, before heading to London to work with longtime friend Kim Jones, the Dior Men designer, and then to New York again. “I don’t rest on my laurels. It’s not my way of thinking. That’s what my mother instilled in me: You have to constantly keep striving to perfect yourself,” she says.

Campbell holds equally high expectations for those who surround her. “I’m all or nothing,” she says. “Just don’t push me to the nothing.”