Pat Cleveland

Pat Cleveland, born Patricia Cleveland on June 23, 1950, in New York City, is an American fashion model and Broadway performer who became one of the first African-American models to achieve widespread prominence in both runway and print work. Her father, Johnny Johnston, was a jazz saxophonist of Irish and Swedish ancestry, and her mother, Lady Bird Cleveland, was an artist of African-American, Native-American, and Irish-Scottish ancestry. Her parents separated when she was young, and she was raised by her mother in Harlem. Among her mother's circle of artist friends was Carl Van Vechten, who took some of Cleveland's earliest photographs. Cleveland later wrote in her memoir Walking with the Muses that her first photographs were actually taken at age fourteen by Van Vechten's friend Adelaide Passen, one of the first women to work as a press photographer in the United States. Cleveland attended Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School for the performing arts and also studied design at New York's High School of Art and Design, with early ambitions of becoming a fashion designer.

Her modeling career began in 1966 when she was spotted on a subway platform by an assistant to Carrie Donovan, fashion editor at Vogue. Donovan invited her to tour the Vogue offices, and the magazine published a feature on her as a promising young designer. That article led to an approach from Ebony, which asked her to model for its Fashion Fair national runway tour. Cleveland accepted and set aside her design aspirations to pursue modeling. The Ebony tour, during which she encountered violent racism in the Southern United States, nonetheless brought her to the attention of designers including Jacques Tiffeau and Stephen Burrows. At eighteen, after designer Oleg Cassini recommended her to Eileen Ford — whose agency Cleveland has said rejected her on the basis of race — she was signed to Wilhelmina Models.

Through the late 1960s and into the 1970s, Cleveland worked with many of the fashion industry's most influential figures, including Diana Vreeland, and was photographed by Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Steven Meisel, Christopher Makos, and Andy Warhol. She briefly became a muse to Salvador Dalí. Her first appearance in American Vogue came in June 1970, photographed by Berry Berenson, and that same year she appeared in the inaugural issue of Essence magazine. Growing disillusioned with what she perceived as racist attitudes toward Black models in the United States, Cleveland relocated to Paris in 1971 at the suggestion of fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez. In Paris she became a house model for Karl Lagerfeld, who was then the principal designer at Chloé, and she vowed not to return to the United States until a Black model appeared on the American cover of Vogue. During the 1970s she modeled for Valentino, Oscar de la Renta, Yves Saint Laurent, Thierry Mugler, Diane von Furstenberg, and Christian Dior. She also became one of Halston's favored group of models, known as the Halstonettes, alongside Karen Bjornson, Anjelica Huston, Alva Chinn, Elsa Peretti, and Pat Ast.

A defining moment in Cleveland's European career came on November 28, 1973, when she participated in the Battle of Versailles Fashion Show, a gala held at the Théâtre Gabriel conceived as a fundraiser for the then-deteriorating Palace of Versailles. The event staged a fashion competition between five French designers — Yves Saint Laurent, Hubert de Givenchy, Pierre Cardin, Emanuel Ungaro, and Christian Dior's Marc Bohan — and five American designers: Bill Blass, Oscar de la Renta, Anne Klein, Halston, and Stephen Burrows. Cleveland was among 36 models who walked the runway, ten of whom were Black, an unprecedented number for the period. The gala was later chronicled in Robin Givhan's 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Battle of Versailles: The Night American Fashion Stumbled into the Spotlight and Made History.

After Beverly Johnson became the first Black model on the cover of American Vogue in August 1974, Cleveland returned to the United States. From the early to late 1970s, her image appeared on the covers of publications including Vanity Fair, Interview, Essence, Harper's, Cosmopolitan, Women's Wear Daily, L'Officiel, The Sunday Times Magazine, GQ, Vogue Paris, W, and Elle. During the mid to late 1970s, Cleveland and her fiancé Sterling St. Jacques gained recognition as a dancing couple, appearing together at prominent New York nightclubs including Hurrah, Regine's, and Studio 54. People magazine dubbed them the hottest couple in America, drawing comparisons to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. In 1976, Cleveland and St. Jacques appeared in the sexually explicit Broadway production Let My People Come, which was performed at the Morosco Theater.

After raising two children, Cleveland returned to modeling on a periodic basis. In 1995 she founded her own modeling agency in Milan. In 2003, she and her daughter Anna walked together for Chanel at Paris Fashion Week. She appeared in the 2010 documentary Ultrasuede, In Search of Halston and served as a guest judge that year on America's Next Top Model. In 2012 she appeared in the documentaries Versailles '73: American Runway Revolution and Timothy Greenfield-Sanders' About Face: Supermodels Then and Now. In 2013 she made an appearance on the modeling reality series The Face, hosted by Naomi Campbell, and participated in a MAC Cosmetics campaign alongside Jerry Hall and Marisa Berenson, created in tribute to Antonio Lopez, who had died of AIDS in 1987. In 2014 she walked for Moschino's Spring Collection in Milan and appeared on the cover of Numéro Russia, shot and styled by Tom Ford. In 2015 she returned to New York Fashion Week to walk for Zac Posen, appeared in Vogue Japan, and was featured in an ad campaign for Barneys New York; she and her daughter Anna were also selected for a campaign for the French fashion house Lanvin. In 2016 she walked for H&M during Paris Fashion Week and appeared on the cover of Vogue Italia alongside her family. In February 2019, at age 68, she walked the runway for Hellessy and Naeem Khan at New York Fashion Week alongside fellow former Halstonettes Karen Bjornson and Alva Chinn, and in March of that year she walked at Paris Fashion Week for Tommy Hilfiger and Zendaya alongside Beverly Johnson and Grace Jones.

The term supermodel was applied to Cleveland as early as 1980, when André Leon Talley, then American editor-at-large for Vogue, described her in the June 1980 issue of Ebony as the all-time superstar model and identified her as the first Black supermodel. In 2019, she was among the former Halston models interviewed for the documentary film Halston.