It was to be the pinnacle of her 35-year modelling career and Naomi Campbell planned to mark it in style.
But her speech accepting a Fashion Icon award at London’s Royal Albert Hall is thought to have prompted the biggest fallout in the fashion world for years.
The supermodel praised generations of trail-blazing black women, including her mother Valerie, at the British Fashion Awards event, but omitted any mention of British Vogue editor Edward Enninful, a friend for more than 30 years.
Downplaying the spat, magazine giant Conde Nast, which publish Vogue, insisted that Ms Campbell appears in the March issue and branded any suggestion of a bust-up as ‘completely false’.
But details have emerged of a bitter exchange of text messages between Ms Campbell, 49, and 47-year-old Mr Enninful in the days after the star-studded awards ceremony.
According to friends, the Vogue editor’s parting shot to the supermodel was a message informing her that her name would never pass his lips again.
Only last March he had described Ms Campbell as ‘loyal, generous, kind and very sensitive’. Mr Enninful said: ‘To me she will always be a legend.’ But a friend of the supermodel revealed that such warm words were not a feature of their recent exchange.
‘These texts are like nothing you’ve seen before, they were really nasty,’ said the friend. ‘Some of the things that Edward has said to Naomi are unbelievably nasty.
‘I don’t know how you repair a friendship after some of the things he said.
‘They haven’t spoken since, and the chances of them doing so ever again are very slim.’
The Mail on Sunday revealed three weeks ago how the friendship had cooled since Ms Campbell’s December 2 speech where she pointedly thanked Dame Anna Wintour, Vogue’s editor-in-chief.