Donyale Luna was the first African American Supermodel. She was also the first African American Supermodel to appear on the cover of British Vogue in 1966. Born Peggy Anne Freeman in Detroit, she often claimed she is of mixed ancestry and not of african descent, though it is a proven fact that she was black and not of the mixed ancestry that she claimed to be. 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 Mexican, American Indian, Chinese, Irish, and, last but least escapable, Negro." 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 ... "
Luna appeared in several Andy Warhol films as one of "The Factory Girls" as well as Fellini's Fellini Satyricon.
Luna died of a drug overdose in 1979 in Rome, Italy. She was 34 years old.
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