As a young girl making her way through New York's modeling industry in the late 1970s, Cheryl Wadlington remembers meeting Naomi Sims, America's first African American cover girl.

"She was wearing all white; it was her signature look," said Wadlington, who, when she was a young model in New York, heard Sims speak. Now she runs a fashion etiquette camp in Philadelphia for teenage girls. Sims "wore a button-up top and a pair of exquisite linen pants. She never was wrinkled and she had the most beautiful chocolate skin. . . ."

At a time when black women were told they were too dark to even think about being cover girls, Sims became the first to do so when she landed the cover of Ladies' Home Journal in 1968. She died Saturday of breast cancer at her home in Newark, N.J. She was 61.

Sims was one of the first models to become an entrepreneur. After a five-year career as one of Halston's top models, she launched a wig line and her own skin-care products. She also penned several books about African American beauty, including one of the most popular, How to Be a Top Model (Doubleday, 1979).

"She represented elegance, dignity, and beauty when her kind of beauty was not the standard," said Vogue editor Andre Leon Talley, who last saw Sims in May at Oprah Winfrey's Legends Ball. As a teenager, Talley had taped to his bedroom wall a photograph of Sims on the cover of Life magazine in 1969. "She broke all the barriers being a dark-skinned woman without light features."

In style circles, she was a heavy hitter.

"She was the Jackie Robinson of the fashion world," said Tina King, president of the Philadelphia chapter of the National Association of Fashion and Accessory Designers, a historically black fashion group. It was as if she represented the beauty side of the black-power movement, King said.

Her combination of lean long limbs with chiseled features and hair pulled back is a familiar image, even if you can't quite place it. It's a look that's elegant and graceful, focusing on natural beauty.

This was the prototype for the exotic, fashionable, high-powered '80s black woman - one that finally edged out the stereotypical Aunt Jemima look. Think Essence editor Susan Taylor without the braids.

Perhaps without Sims, we wouldn't have the exotic, dark-skinned supermodel Alek Wek or the beauty-with-business-sense combo of Tyra Banks. But for everyday women, Sims looked like the classy femme fatale next door, and even served as inspiration for the sophisticated style of Dynasty diva Diahann Carroll and the post-Supremes Diana Ross.

Philadelphia's Sessilee Lopez, a regular at New York Fashion Week who shared pages with Sims in Italian Vogue's black issue in August, has a look that mirrors her predecessor: sleek hair, high cheekbones, full lips.

"When I saw her, I saw a woman who looked like me, like my neighbors," said former fashion journalist Vanessa Lloyd Sgambati, who covered Sims on the Milan runways at the peak of her career. "People would look at her in awe. . . . Her beauty was a natural beauty, a beauty that you would never find today."

Sims was born in Oxford, Miss., grew up as a foster child in Pittsburgh, and moved as a young adult to New York to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology. She wanted to be a model, but she repeatedly had doors slammed in her face. She kept trying and eventually called Gosta Peterson, a fashion photographer for the New York Times, and asked that they work together. That led to her landing a cover spot on the new Fashion of the Times supplement in 1967.

Ladies' Home Journal followed, and Life came after.

After five years of modeling, she quit and started her own businesses. The idea was to lift the spirit of African American women from the inside. She stayed true to her message of black empowerment, turning down the title role in Cleopatra Jones (1973) because of the way the movie portrayed black people. (The role went to Tamara Dobson.)

"There were other black models, yes, like Dorothea Towles Church in Paris and Vogue's Donyale Luna," Talley said. "But she was a trailblazer."

This article includes information from the New York Times.

Contact fashion writer Elizabeth Wellington at 215- 854-2704 or ewellington@phillynews.com.