"She was wearing all white; it was her signature look," said Wadlington, who, when models agency was a young model in New York, heard Sims speak. Now she runs a fashion etiquette camp in Philadelphia for teenage girls. Sims "wore a button-up top and a pair of exquisite linen pants. She never was wrinkled and she had the most beautiful chocolate skin. . . ."
At a time when black women were told they were too dark to even think about being mature women cover girls, Sims became the first to do so when she landed the cover of Ladies' Home Journal in 1968. She died Saturday of breast cancer at her home in Newark, N.J. She was 61.Sims was one of the first models to become an entrepreneur. After a five-year hip hop career as one of Halston's top models, she launched a wig line and her own skin-care products. She also penned several books about African American beauty, including one of the most popular, How to Be a Top Model (Doubleday, 1979).
"She represented elegance, dignity, and beauty when her kind of beauty model agency was not the standard," said Vogue editor Andre Leon Talley, who last saw Sims in May at Oprah Winfrey's Legends Ball. As a teenager, Talley had taped to his bedroom wall a photograph of Sims on the cover of Life magazine in 1969. "She broke all the barriers being a dark-skinned woman without light features."In style circles, she was a heavy hitter.
"She was the Jackie Robinson of the models agency fashion world," said Tina King, president of the Philadelphia chapter of the National Association of Fashion and Accessory Designers, a historically black fashion group. It was as if she represented the beauty side of the black-power movement, King said.
Her combination of lean long limbs with chiseled features and hair pulled back is a familiar image, even if you can't quite place it. It's a look that's elegant and graceful, focusing on natural beauty.
Source: philly.com
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