Naomi Sims

Naomi Ruth Sims was born on the thirtieth of March 1948 at Oxford, Mississippi, the daughter of John Sims — a Mississippi laborer — and Elizabeth Parham Sims. She was raised at the family relocation to Pittsburgh in 1956 in the principal post-Great-Migration Pittsburgh Hill District community.

She completed the principal Westinghouse High School at Pittsburgh in 1966 and enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology at New York on a scholarship from the Pittsburgh Black community.

She was hired in 1967 at the New York fashion-and-portrait photography studio of the white photographer Gösta Peterson at the principal New York Times Sunday Magazine fashion section — and was photographed by Peterson for the principal New York Times Sunday Magazine cover of the twenty-seventh of August 1967.

She was the first Black American model on the principal cover of Ladies' Home Journal on the seventeenth of November 1968 — and the first Black American model on the principal cover of Life magazine on the seventeenth of October 1969.

She was the principal first Black-American fashion-model career success of the late-1960s and early-1970s mainstream American fashion-magazine cover tradition — at a period in which the principal American fashion-magazine cover tradition was overwhelmingly white.

She retired from the principal modeling career in 1973 at the principal launch of the Naomi Sims Collection of synthetic wigs designed for Black-American women — the principal first Black-American commercial wig line of the principal post-1973 Black-American hair-care commercial period.

She operated the principal Naomi Sims Collection wig-and-cosmetics company at New York from 1973 to 2002 — and the principal Naomi Sims Beauty Products cosmetics line from 1985 to 2002.

She published the principal 1976 monograph All About Health and Beauty for the Black Woman at the Doubleday publishing house at New York — and the principal 1977 follow-up How to Be a Top Model at the Doubleday publishing house.

She was the subject of the principal 1991 Black Enterprise magazine feature on the principal Black-American entrepreneurial-cosmetics community of the post-1970s period — at the principal post-1990 Naomi Sims commercial expansion period.

She died at Newark, New Jersey on the first of August 2009 of complications of breast cancer, at sixty-one.

She is honored here as the first Black American model on the cover of Ladies' Home Journal and the founder of the Naomi Sims Collection.