“I’m not a horse to be bet on!” – Malek Namlaghi explores the beauty and the ugliness of Miss World 1978

Feminist final year project recalls graduate’s moment in the global spotlight

A Middlesex graduate has turned her experiences of competing in and dramatically quitting the 1978 Miss World competition – which made international headlines at the time – into art.

Malek Namlaghi was crowned Miss Tunisia at 18 in 1977. The organiser of the Tunis contest put her in contact with Miss World in London – then at the height of its popularity, with a global TV audience of more than 100 million for the annual pageant at the Royal Albert Hall. Malek was chosen as one of 68 entrants, the biggest field the contest had seen up to that point.

But while her experience of beauty contests in Tunisia had been about fun and a chance for young women to make their own way – “the winner would win money or travel or she could get a contract with cinema or in modelling,” Malek says – she discovered there was a big culture of betting around Miss World at that time. 

The choice of winners felt to her highly staged and out of sync with the expectations of ordinary fans. Controversies around race loomed over the event, which had a black winner for the first time in 1970.

South Africa was banned from competing in 1978 over the government’s apartheid policies, having sent two competitors, one white and one black, to previous Miss Worlds. Even before Malek left Tunisia, “I knew that I wasn’t there for the winning, that’s for sure,” she says.

“I said I'm not a horse to be bet on,” recalls Malek, who felt trapped in a merry-go-round of dinners and champagne galas. “I'm not here for sex. I'm here for beauty." For a photoshoot in which the contestants were to dress in T-shirts and boxer shorts, she refused to take off her yashmak in protest. “Because when you're rating 68 girls and one is missing, you know, it's not nice for the betting business,” she says. “Imagine when you go to the racing, when you have a good horse and it's not there."

Organisers told her “either you do like the other girls, or you are sacked – take it or leave it’”. Malek stood firm and was disqualified. The UK and international media, which had been reporting daily on the build-up to the competition, were gripped, although Malek says that at the time she wasn’t looking at any newspapers because she was so busy.

Malek’s BA Fine Art final year project captures the collision of the glamorous image of Miss World with her one-woman protest. It consists of five metre high black-and-white banners; a short film juxtaposing archive footage of 19-year-old Malek introducing herself, with her in the same pose 47 years later; and a montage of 1978 tabloid headlines – “It’s veil… and farewell”; “Miss Yashmak is out of this World”; “Miss Yashmak, Look What You Missed”; “Pretty Misses A Hit”. Malek had kept some press cuttings in an album, while others she found in newspaper libraries. 

There is also a sketch Malek drew as she began to explore her memories, of a powerful cantering horse with a veil across its muzzle, a beauty queen’s crown on its head and its mane flying. 

“It was stressful, I was upset. I felt the discrimination including of course racial. All these men - I didn't want to feel like an object."

Malek Namlaghi

“I had always wanted to talk about this subject, but I didn't know how to bring it up,” she says. Then last year, she went to Tate Britain’s Women in Revolt!, an exhibition of feminist art from 1970-1990. “I thought, my God, I should have been here - it made a flash in my mind!” she says.

She went to talk to her lecturer about making work about her story – “and they were very excited and they loved the subject,” she says,  "because I was a protester, I was an insider. It’s even stronger when one is an insider."

Malek says she wanted to explore the “very artistic” tension between beauty and ugliness in her work.

Back in 1978, Malek walking out of Miss World “made a big boom” even by the standards of the competition – “it was all over the world.” Malek says she had never intended to quit permanently, she just wanted to make her point. 

Another factor was France Soir publishing a photograph obtained from Tunisia of Malek in a swimsuit, which was quickly reprinted all over the world. 

Malek came back without her yashmak for the final day of competition and took part in the swimsuit round, leading to another set of breathless headlines included in her project montage – “Miss Tunisia can compete”; “Veiled beauty agrees to take it off today”; “We have lift-off!” 

Argentine model Silvana Suarez won the contest that year, with Miss Wales and Miss United Kingdom Ann Jones making the Top 7.

Malek came back to London a year after the competition and established a health and beauty institute in Kensington. She later went on to train in make-up special effects for cinema, TV and the stage, working for BBC contractors and private clients.

She briefly went to drawing classes in Paris in her early thirties, and more recently while living in Saudi Arabia in 2016 launched a fashion business, designing clothes for Middle Eastern women. 

Stuck in London at the start of the pandemic, not knowing what she wanted to do, she inquired at Westminster Adult Education Service next to where she was living and found out they offered art programmes - “an opportunity for me to study art properly”. She took A Levels and a Foundation Year degree; her tutors encouraged her to pursue her studies further, and a talk at college led her to apply successfully to Middlesex.

“I loved it here,” she says about her degree. Her lecturers were “very understanding and professional - the standard is high and quite an inspiration”. She valued the size of the studios for art students, and how accustomed lecturers are to mature students studying undergraduate degrees. 

“The facilities are fantastic – that’s number one,” she adds. “We have everything." Inspired by Louise Bourgeois and British-Palestinian installation artist Mona Khatum, she made work in a wide variety of media during her course, including ceramic, chicken wire sculpture, heated plastic, textile printing and photography.

She enjoyed sharing her experiences and artistic judgements with younger students. “I criticise – I tell them this is how I feel, this is how I do it. I like to help others."

Meanwhile, she is a passionate advocate for continuing education and hopes she might progress to a Masters herself. Early on during her degree, she went back to talk to female students at Westminster Adult Education Service as a representative of Middlesex.

“I told them to carry on studying and get more education,” she says. "Even if you are a certain age, it doesn't matter."

Find out more about studying Fine Art at Middlesex University.