ABOVE THE FRAY

How Donyale Luna, the first black supermodel and first woman of color to grace the cover of Vogue, inadvertently personified Francesco Queirolo’s famed 18th Century marble sculpture ‘Il Disinganno’, also known as The Release from Deception… One of the three masterpieces that decorate the Sansevero Chapel in Naples, the statue is widely regarded as Queirolo’s pièce de résistance, most notably recognized for the delicate net draping around his renowned fisherman, which was carved out of a single block of marble. Depicting a scene that is both biblical and allegorical, an angel, representing human intellect, liberates the fisherman from the constrictive net, whilst hovering above the globe. The scene shares a glaringly similar metaphor with the many photographs of Donyale Luna in which she is covered in net dresses and knotted accoutrements. The American mixed race model, a favorite of French couturiers Paco Rabanne and Yves Saint Laurent, as well as muse to Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, Richard Avedon, and The Rolling Stones, broke free of her own symbolic net as she inherently became the face of civil rights while changing the nature of the fashion industry and the world’s understanding of beauty.

Donyale’s fame began in “…the autumn of 1964, just months after the Civil Rights Act was passed - legally prohibiting racial discrimination for the first time in American history - and the coming years would see the assassination of Martin Luther King, the race riots that devastated her home city and the founding of the Black Panthers. There were virtually no modelling opportunities for non-white faces anywhere other than dedicated African-American publications such as Ebony… As a girl of colour at that time, simply believing in her own worth and following her true calling were great revolutionary acts… The world was in the middle of a cultural revolution, and my mother was on the front lines of the Swinging ’60s. Almost against her own will, she became a symbol. Some people declared her a Masai warrior, Gauguinesque, Nefertiti reborn. Others claimed she was another species entirely…” • Donyale’s daughter Dream Cazzaniga for Vogue