Naomi Campbell knows her best angles, even in a hazmat suit. The supermodel and prolific Instagram user—her handle, fittingly, is just @naomi—posted four photos of herself on Tuesday night, in each of them wearing a protective suit, gloves, and a face mask. “Safety first,” she captioned the first, standalone image:
But it was the second where she really put her modeling skills to use, posing with a suitcase inside Los Angeles International Airport and snapping a selfie on board, her pink latex gloves on full display. “Safety First NEXT LEVEL,” the caption began:
It’s easy to imagine wealthy, well-connected celebrities taking abundant precautions as Covid-19 spreads across the globe. America’s Got Talent judge Howie Mandel, known to avoid handshakes well before it was in vogue, was photographed wearing a gas mask and hazmat suit on his way to work on Tuesday. Céline Dion only has a cold but postponed her concerts anyway, and became one of the select people in America to actually be tested for Covid-19. When a false rumor spread on Tuesday that Daniel Radcliffe was the “first famous person to be publicly confirmed” as having coronavirus, it felt particularly shocking because, wait, he’s famous! Shouldn’t he be able to hop in his hazmat suit and avoid it?
It is, undeniably, dystopian to see famous people posing for Instagram in protective gear, the same way that hand sanitizer manufactured by the state of New York or the delay of a movie nobody realized existed might be funny if they didn’t represent something so grim. Then again, in the absence of real guidance from the government or authority figures, why not let Howie Mandel and Naomi Campbell show us how to respond? The hand-washing meme may well morph into the hazmat selfie, and as with everything else, Naomi will have gotten there first.
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