The Dark Story Of The First Black Male Supermodel - Sterling St. Jacques

Before Tyson Beckford, before any Black man had a name in the fashion world, there was Sterling St. Jacques — a 6'2" force of nature with gray eyes, a trademark twirl, and a Central Park South apartment who ruled the runways of Givenchy, Halston, and Yves Saint Laurent and turned Studio 54 into his personal stage. His dancing was so magnetic that Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers watched him one night and went home and wrote "He's the Greatest Dancer" for Sister Sledge, a song that hit number one and outlived him by decades. He appeared to have everything — a famous Hollywood father figure, a relationship with Givenchy's founder in a French chateau, the friendship of Jackie O and Bianca Jagger, and a body the fashion industry had never seen before on a Black man. But when the disco era ended, fashion moved on — and Sterling had nowhere to go, no infrastructure, no safety net, and no industry that had ever truly wanted him as a person rather than a spectacle. By the early 1980s he had fled to Europe, broke and quietly unraveling, releasing Italo disco songs that went nowhere, his last confirmed public appearance a booking at a Genova nightclub in July 1985 — and then nothing. No confirmed death certificate, no funeral, no statement from the industry that had built its downtown mythology on the back of his image, just a $1 bequest in his former lover's will and a mystery that has never been solved.