Smith, Barbara ("B. Smith")

August 24, 1949

Entrepreneur, model, and author Barbara Smith was born in western Pennsylvania and grew up in Everson, a working class town near Pittsburgh. After developing an interest in modeling, she took weekend classes at the John Robert Powers modeling school in Pittsburgh and graduated just before her high school commencement. When she was nineteen, the slender and attractive Smith was selected to serve as a model for the Ebony Fashion Fair's traveling show. She moved to New York to participate in the fair and begin her modeling career.

Smith's beauty, grace, and intelligence won top spots for her. She appeared on five covers for Essence, the first model so honored. In 1976 she became the first African American to appear on the cover of Mademoiselle. Since then she has appeared in over fifty print advertisements and television commercials, the most well known of which was a 1990s ad for Oil of Olay.

In the mid-1980s Smith scaled back her modeling to concentrate on the restaurant business, an interest she acquired as a youth watching and assisting her mother and grandmother prepare for family gatherings. Entering a partnership with Ark Restaurant Corporation, she has opened three B. Smith restaurants, two in New York and one in Washington, D.C.

B. Smith, as she prefers to be known, published B. Smith's Entertaining and Cooking for Friends in 1995. In 1997 she began hosting Smith with Style, a half-hour television show. In late 1999 she launched B. Smith Style, a magazine dedicated to her interests in food, fashion, and beauty. That year, too, she published her second book, B. Smith Rituals and Celebrations, which won Food and Wine Magazine 's 1999 "Best of the Best" Book Award.

See also Entrepreneurs and Entrepreneurship; Hair and Beauty Culture in the United States

Bibliography

B. Smith Web site, <http://www.bsmith.com>.

Current Biography Yearbook 1998. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1998.

Mabubda, L. Mpho, and Shirelle Phelps, eds. Contemporary Black Biography, vol. 11. Detroit, Mich.: Gale, 1996.

Reed, Julia. "Can B. Smith Be Martha?" New York Times Magazine, August 22, 1999.

jessie carney smith (1996)
Updated by publisher 2005