Black History Month: Donyale Luna

   Donyale Luna (31 August 1945 - 17 May 1979) was a model and cover girl. She also appeared in several films, in Camp by Andy Warhol, Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo? by William Klein

After being discovered by the photographer David McCabe, she moved from Detroit to New York City to pursue a modeling career. In January 1965, a sketch of Luna appeared on the cover of Harper's Bazaar. She became the first African American model to appear on the cover of a Vogue magazine, the March 1966 British issue, shot by British photographer David Bailey.

                     

According to The New York Times, she was under exclusive contract to the photographer Richard Avedon for a year at the beginning of her career.

An article in Time magazine published on 1 April 1966, "The Luna Year", described her as "a new heavenly body who, because of her striking singularity, promises to remain on high for many a season. Donyale Luna, as she calls herself, is unquestionably the hottest model in Europe at the moment. She is only 20, a Negro, hails from Detroit, and is not to be missed if one reads Harper's Bazaar, Paris Match, Britain's Queen, the British, French or American editions of Vogue.

In 1967, the mannequin manufacturer Adel Rootstein created a mannequin in Luna's image, a follow-up to the company's Twiggy mannequin of 1966.

Luna appeared in a nude photo layout in the April 1975 issue of Playboy; the photographer was Luigi Cazzaniga.

According to the journalist Judy Stone, who wrote a profile of Luna for The New York Times in 1968, the model was "secretive, mysterious, contradictory, evasive, mercurial, and insistent upon her multiracial lineage -- exotic, chameleon strands of Indigenous-Mexican, Indonesian, Irish, and, last but least escapable, African." A London magazine hailed her as "the completely New Image of the Negro woman. Fashion finds itself in an instrumental position for changing history, however slightly, for it is about to bring out into the open the veneration, the adoration, the idolization of the Negro ... "

When Stone asked her about whether her appearances in Hollywood films would benefit the cause of black actresses, Luna answered, "If it brings about more jobs for Mexicans, Asians, Native Americans, Africans, groovy. It could be good, it could be bad. I couldn't care less.

In the late 1960s, in an interview, Luna expressed her fondness for LSD: "I think it's great. I learned that I like to live, I like to make love, I really do love somebody, I love flowers, I love the sky, I like bright colors, I like animals. [LSD] also showed me unhappy things -- that I was stubborn, selfish, unreasonable, mean, that I hurt other people."

Luna died in Rome, Italy, in a clinic, after an accidental drug overdose

 

Salvador Dali