Here she was at Madison Square Garden introducing Rihanna in late August at the Video Music Awards. There she was the next weekend at the Venice Film Festival for the premiere of “Franca: Chaos and Creation,” a documentary about Italian Vogue’s longtime editor, Franca Sozzani.
Seventy-two hours later, Naomi Campbell returned to New York and Madison Square Garden, where she took selfies with Kim Kardashian West at the Kanye West concert before heading off to Beyoncé’s “Soul Train”-themed birthday party at the NoMad Hotel.
A day later, she made a guest appearance on Bravo’s “Watch What Happens: Live,” then attended a slew of events for New York Fashion Week, including Tom Ford’s show at the Four Seasons restaurant.
Beyond the party circuit, Ms. Campbell can be spotted on the current covers of Paper and Another Magazine, as well as in a fashion spread in the August Italian Vogue, where she is photographed with a mammoth new coffee table book, simply called “Naomi Campbell,” which chronicles her 30 years in fashion.
Ms. Campbell can also been seen on TV, with roles in two hit shows: “American Horror Story: Hotel” and “Empire.” In each, she dialed up the camp and then died so glamorously, it was a wonder neither of her onscreen murders was captured in a noirish spread for W, the kind she has done numerous times.
Less than a decade ago, this fiery supermodel was one of the industry’s most notorious bad girls, an Azzedine Alaïa-clad diva on the verge of becoming a tabloid joke after pleading guilty to aggravated assault twice in 17 months, first in New York for lobbinga Blackberry at her housekeeper and second for scuffling with two British police officers at Heathrow Airport when her luggage went missing.
Today, at 46, Ms. Campbell is ubiquitous once again, walking her signature walk here, there and everywhere, while enjoying a career peak seldom seen in the youth-obsessed fashion world.
But Ms. Campbell’s breakneck pace raises questions: How far can she ride this wave in a business that traditionally has had limited use for models over 40? Did her breakup with a certain Russian oligarch propel her to focus again on career? And what exactly does Ms. Campbell hope to achieve from all these appearances, all these campaigns and all these interviews?
Even she doesn’t seem clear on the answer.
“There’s no plan,” Ms. Campbell said on a recent afternoon. “There’s no agenda. I know. There probably should be, right?”
Maybe. Maybe not.
Everyone in fashion knows Ms. Campbell’s walk and the cock of the head to the right as she peers with insouciance at the photographers standing in front of the runway.
Growing up in a poor area of South London, Ms. Campbell took dance lessons, and that training is evident in her modeling.
“She feels the music like no other,” said John Galliano, the fashion designer. “When she appears to do a show, it’s actually not so easy for the other models. Because she commands. She slays.”
While in high school, Ms. Campbell was discovered by a modeling agent.
From there, things moved quickly. By age 22, she had been on the cover of multiple editions of Vogue; starred with Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington and Cindy Crawford in George Michael’s “Freedom 90” video; and disrobed for the photographer Steven Meisel in Madonna’s “Sex” book.
“I didn’t even tell my boyfriend I was doing it, because I knew he wouldn’t approve,” said Ms. Campbell, whose famous partners over the years also included U2’s Adam Clayton, Mike Tyson and Robert De Niro.
She was also notoriously difficult, a temperamental celebrity and an admitted abuser of cocaine and alcohol who arrived at photo shoots hours late.
Even people who stuck by her do not deny experiencing this side. The producer and director Lee Daniels recalled meeting Ms. Campbell for the first time in the early ’90s, when he cast her for a public service announcement for Rock the Vote.
“She showed up to the shoot three hours late,” he said. “The limousine door opened and she came out like Cruella de Vil. And I was screaming at her at the top of my lungs at the audacity of coming that late to my set, and she was screaming back at me. I fired her on the spot and fell in love with her there and then.”
Her temper became legendary in 2007, when she pleaded guilty to hurling that cellphone, then opted to have her community service for the New York City Sanitation Department captured by the photographer Steven Klein as a fashion spread for W Magazine.
That imperial sense of pride was on full display in 2010, before the International Criminal Tribunal against Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, who had gifted Ms. Campbell three gemstones (possible blood diamonds) in the late ’90s.
Until the trial, Ms. Campbell had been often seen but rarely heard. But she wasted no time confirming the public’s image of her. Wearing a cream-colored Alaïa cardigan and matching dress, Ms. Campbell sneered at the suggestion that she was somehow impressed by the gift, dismissing the diamonds that two men handed her in an unmarked pouch as “dirty looking stones.”
“When I’m used to seeing diamonds, I’m used to seeing them shiny and in a box,” Ms. Campbell testified.
And the clothes stunned. “She looked like Lana Turner,” said Bethann Hardison, the pioneering runway model from the 1970s and a longtime friend. “To me, that was the ultimate Naomi Campbell moment.”
It burnished her image. “Naomi’s fun to watch, because there is a little bit of the unpredictable,” Ms. Crawford said.
Over the next few years, Ms. Campbell’s life slowed somewhat. She was entering her 40s and less frequently in the spotlight.
She took on activist causes, including a push to increase diversity on the runway. She signed on to host the Oxygen reality show “The Face,” on aspiring models. And she found love with Vladislav Doronin, the Russian oligarch, said to be worth around $1 billion.
The two met at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008, and they had a romance that was well documented by the paparazzi, who trailed them around the Mediterranean and wherever jets landed and yachts moored
Ms. Campbell even brought him along to visits with Nelson Mandela, who had been a kind of honorary grandfather. In 2012, Mr. Doronin held a giant 50th birthday party in Jodhpur, India, attended by many people in her formidable address book, among them Kate Moss, Bob Geldof and Diana Ross, who came out of semiretirement to sing before the crowd of 200.
By this point, Ms. Campbell had largely gotten a handle on her addiction and her anger issues. She even began operating as an unofficial sobriety captain for some of fashion’s biggest names.
“You know, I took a bit of a break from the industry, and she was there at every turn,” said Mr. Galliano, referring to his 2011 exit from Dior. “It’s thanks to Miss Naomi Campbell that I actually got to Arizona,” he added, referring to his time in rehab.
“Well, me, too,” Marc Jacobs said. “She teamed up with my business partner Robert Duffy, and Anna Wintour, and the three of them did my intervention. Naomi started it all. She recognized I was having terrible problems. When I’ve relapsed, it’s been like telepathy. I mean, she’s parked in front of my house when she thought something was wrong.”
Then, in 2013, the relationship with Mr. Doronin imploded.
In an “All About Eve” moment in a reality show era, Mr. Doronin was photographed aboard his yacht with a model named Luo Zilin, who represented China in the 2011 Miss Universe pageant, and who had been mentored on “The Face” by Ms. Campbell.
As friends tell it, she was devastated.
“It was a tough one,” Mr. Galliano said.
But as Ms. Campbell has proved time and time again, she is a fighter who knows how to bounce back. Her singular ability to get into trouble is superseded only by her knack for getting out of it.
“When disaster hits, I’m actually quite calm,” she said, speaking of her various ups and downs. “I just think: ‘What’s the action? What’s the solution?’”
In this case, it was jump-starting her career.
Days before the yacht photographs were published, Ms. Campbell made a triumphant return on the Milan runway, walking in her first Versace show in 14 years, wearing a black leather micromini, her hips swaying, her hair sashaying as people in the audience rose to applaud.
When “The Face” was canceled in its second season, and Ms. Campbell heard that her friend Mr. Daniels had a new drama for Fox, she lobbied for a part.
“One of the things I so respect about Naomi is that she has incredible drive, and she’s not embarrassed to ask for things she wants or to say, ‘I deserve this.’” Ms. Wintour said. “Didn’t she pitch herself to Lee for ‘Empire?’ I think she did. Girl power, right?”
“Yup,” Mr. Daniels said. “That’s pretty much what happened.”
After “Empire” became a hit, Ms. Campbell was invited to a dinner for the Burberry designer Christopher Bailey at the Los Angeles home of Bryan Lourd, the Hollywood power agent, and was seated next to Ryan Murphy, one of the hottest producers in television.
The next day, Mr. Murphy’s team began writing a part for Ms. Campbell as an aggressive fashion editor on “American Horror Story: Hotel,” while her friends in fashion signed her up for all sorts of gigs.
A spring 2016 Balmain campaign featured her primping and posing with her fellow supermodels Ms. Crawford and Claudia Schiffer. Then came Ms. Campbell’s book with Taschen and a commercial for Beats, where she drove a Rolls-Royce Phantom with DJ Khaled while whispering sweet nothings in his ear. (Never mind that she can barely drive.)
Over the last year, Ms. C ampbell became a steadfast fixture on the social circuit, appearing at dozens of charities, galas, music festivals and fashion events in New York and elsewhere, where, rather than treating her as if she were a carnivalesque curiosity, people acknowledged her as a survivor of numerous setbacks who had come out on top.
The breakup with Mr. Doronin, however, still stung.
As Ms. Campbell said in one unguarded moment backstage at “Watch What Happens: Live,” “I’m friends with all my exes, except the last one.”
Some may wonder just how far a 46-year-old model breaking into acting can take all this, but it’s clear people are rooting for her.
One is Ms. Wintour, who said of Ms. Campbell: “There’s been a lot of talk about Naomi over the years. But what’s always impressed me is how motivated she is and how hard she works. She’s a fighter for herself, for women of color and for the causes she believes in.”
Another supporter is Mr. Daniels, who said that part of the reason people remain in her orbit, despite all the ups and downs, is because she’s fiercely loyal, surprisingly attuned to others and great fun. “I think she’s just getting started,” he said.
Vestiges of the old Ms. Campbell remain. As with many addicts in recovery, she is both preternaturally driven and utterly disorganized. She vacillates between extreme confidence and near-paralyzing insecurity, and friends say they cannot predict which they will experience: Naomi, the fiery tiger; or Naomi, the meek schoolgirl. “Neither can I,” she said.
At an April release party at the Diamond Horseshoe for her book, Ms. Campbell was a puddle of tears at the prospect of giving a toast, surrounded by friends like Ms. Wintour, Mr. Jacobs, André Leon Talley and Gayle King. “She’s a Bambi,” Mr. Galliano said. “She collapses.”
She is late to appearances so often, she could best Mariah Carey in a contest for world’s most tardy female celebrity.
Part of this may have to do with her inability to leave the house without a glam squad. Her black Escalade shuttles her between appearances like a chariot, and woe to those who ride alongside and disrupt her delicate equilibrium.
This happened in June, when Ms. Campbell was leaving a Midtown gala for amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, for a late-night bite at Cipriani Downtown, talking on the phone to a trans-Atlantic mystery man (who may or may not have been her newest boyfriend), with the stylist Edward Enninful, and Javier Salgado, and a member of her managment, in tow.
As the car turned left onto Bleecker Street, Ms. Campbell’s tuxedo-clad companions got noisy, talking among themselves. Soon, she’d had enough.
“Will you shut up?” Ms. Campbell said, bellowing. “Do you even know how loud you are? Can’t you see I’m trying to talk on the phone?”
Mr. Salgado and Mr. Enninful burst out laughing, and so did she.
The car pulled up to Cipriani. Mr. Enninful waited on the curb, while Ms. Campbell remained inside the car, still talking on her phone. Who was taking up all this time? “This one, that one, the other one,” Mr. Enninful said. “I’ve lost track.”
She emerged 20 minutes later, her phone still glued to her ear, though she had changed out of her heels into a pair of gray Alaïa ballet flats. She did not apologize for the wait, and simply announced in charming, unprintable language how hungry she was.
The group bounded up the stairs to a V.I.P. section of the restaurant, along with her bodyguard, Mike, whose job this evening mostly involved holding her purse. Music from Grace Jones blared, and waiters rushed to take her order.
When Ms. Campbell’s lamb chops arrived, a look came across her face. Something was missing. “Mike,” she screamed. “Can you bring me my purse?”
Her bodyguard brought over her black bag. She pulled out a silver vial and placed it on the table. It looked like a fancy storage device for something illicit, but Ms. Campbell made clear there was no cause for alarm.
“Hot sauce,” she said, handing it to a tablemate. “Try some.”
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