Naomi Campbell says Christy Turlington would refuse modelling jobs if they wouldn’t hire both of them.
The 45-year-old model has spoken of the close bond she had with her fellow model in the 1990s and insists they have always supported each other.
She said: "She was my roommate, yeah! I actually don’t think I would be modelling if it weren’t for her. She is a really generous person and an amazing soul and we are still in contact with each other all the time and whenever I see her there is no love lost. We just pick up where we left off. Our whole group is very supportive of each other.
"Christy would say to designers, ‘If you aren’t using Naomi in the show you aren’t using us’, because some designers wouldn’t use black models … Not many people would do that and put themselves in jeopardy. My girls, you know, we were not rivals and we were very supportive of each other and still are."
The group – which also included the likes of Cindy Crawford and Linda Evangelista – are known as the original supermodels and Naomi has admitted she found all the attention surrounding them a "bit weird" at the beginning.
Speaking on the upcoming episode of Alan Carr Chatty Man, which airs tonight (21.04.16), she added: "I don’t know. We never said that [we were the originals]. We’ve never said that until this day, that is what the press said. That was their term for calling us. We didn’t make that name up and we didn’t bring it in to our group. We were just called by our names.
"We thought it was a bit weird that we had to wake up in the morning and read what we ate for breakfast on the front cover of an Italian newspaper, but then we were like we really need to start being more private because look what has happened. The focus was hard, hard-core, but we dealt with it."