Toukie Smith, the Philadelphia-born model whom Bloomingdale’s named its Model of the Year in 1978, has died at 74 after a long illness with multiple sclerosis. Her twin sons, Airyn and Julian, announced her death, and described her illness as a “long, courageous battle.”
Smith modeled for some of the houses that defined late-century fashion, among them Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent, Thierry Mugler and Issey Miyake. In those decades the runways of Paris and New York were overwhelmingly white, and a Black woman who worked for those names and was crowned by a Fifth Avenue department store was working in a room that had not been built for her.
She carried that career to the screen. Smith played Eva Rawley on the NBC sitcom “227” in 1989 and 1990, a series set in a Black Washington, D.C., apartment building and built around Black women. She also appeared in films including “The Preacher’s Wife” and “I Like It Like That.” In the 1990s she opened a restaurant in New York City under her own name.
Her older brother, Willi Smith, was a fashion pioneer. He died in 1987, two years before she joined the cast of “227.”
Much of the coverage of her death has led with her relationship with the actor Robert De Niro, the father of her sons. The record says more. She was a working model at the top of her trade, an actress with a place on network television and the owner of her own restaurant, and that is how she should be remembered.
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