The Extraordinary Path of Donyale Luna

 

Donyale Luna

Her real name was Peggy Ann Freeman. She was born in Detroit in 1945, grew up in difficult circumstances — her father was killed by her mother when she was eighteen — and reinvented herself so completely that when people asked where she was from, she told them the moon. That level of self-invention takes something.

David McCabe spotted her on a Detroit street in 1964 and sent her photographs to Harper's Bazaar. The magazine's response was to commission a sketch for their January cover rather than run the photograph — racially ambiguous enough to satisfy advertisers in the southern states who had already threatened to pull out. Richard Avedon photographed her for the April issue the following year. The images were extraordinary. American Vogue still wouldn't touch her.

So she moved to London, where in March 1966 David Bailey put her on the cover of British Vogue — the first Black model on the cover of any Vogue edition. The pose, her face partially obscured by her hand, has two competing explanations: Bailey's Picasso influence, or editorial nerves about her features. Probably both things can be true simultaneously. Beverly Johnson's 1974 American Vogue cover gets cited more often. The eight-year gap between the two is its own commentary on the difference between London and New York at the time.

In the same year Time magazine ran a piece called "The Luna Year." She was twenty. She was also, by that point, a muse to Salvador Dalí, a fixture at Warhol's Factory, and dating Brian Jones. Pat Cleveland described walking into restaurants with her: "People would stop eating and stand up and applaud. She was like a mirage, or some kind of fantasy." When pressed on whether her success might open doors for other Black women, Luna replied: "If it brings about more jobs for Mexicans, Chinese, Indians, Negroes — groovy. It could be good, it could be bad. I couldn't care less." She was not interested in being a symbol, which is partly why history kept losing her.

She moved to Italy, married a photographer, appeared in Fellini's Satyricon. The modelling work became less consistent. She died in Rome in 1979, aged thirty-three.

The fashion industry is not especially good at remembering the people who made it possible to look the way it does now. Luna is a case in point — genuinely foundational, genuinely forgotten, and far more interesting than the official version of the story tends to allow.

Another 60s icon who refused to be contained by the industry — read our piece on Veruschka.