She became known to Roland Sharette, the managing director of the Detroit Civic Center Theatre, as a "kook" because she had a habit of walking around barefoot "even down the street.” During the 1963 run of Paint Your Wagon she fed popcorn to pigeons when they rehearsed outdoors.

[25] By 1972, when she had moved to Rome, she was working for Danish photographer Gunnar Larsen [fr], modeling for the couturier Ted Lapidus alongside Veruschka and Jean Shrimpton on the streets of Paris, earning "$1000 ... for the day" ($6,250 in 2020).

Brigid Keenan wrote that Luna "until then any Black person who appeared in a fashion picture was usually there because they'd been popped into the background as a kind of prop" such as Bani Yelverton, who was in 1958 placed "on the far right of the foldout, so she could be easily torn out of the magazine by [offended] readers".

[41] Living in London, she was described in Jet magazine as "the most photographed girl of 1966 ... challenging Jean Shrimpton for position (and bankroll) as the model most in demand in Europe's haute couture houses.

In April 1967 Donyale also frequented Trude Heller's discotheque in Greenwich Village and covered a number of albums for Blue Note Records such as Lush Life, Mustang, A New Conception, Let 'em Roll and Easy Walker.

[43] Luna appeared in American Vogue in August 1969 and in 1970 in an advertisement for a colored contacts company which she often wore, it was reported she "changes her eyes to match her moods as she flits through Rome's posh parties while picture making for Carlo Ponti.

She is only 20, a Negro, hails from Detroit, and is not to be missed if one reads Harper's Bazaar, Paris Match, Britain's Queen, the British, French or American editions of Vogue.

[71] Italy Luna appeared in the Italian magazine Amica in a number of animal print and fur coats in 1966 and Vogue Italia shot by Gian Paolo Barbieri.

[73] When Luna moved to Italy in 1974 she was a collaborator with her husband in photographic shoots and other media such as a "hand-illustrated fairy tale, avant-garde film scripts and beautiful coloured prints" which remain unpublished.

In a short prose piece entitled LUNAFLYLABY, she wrote a self-aware "part confessional [work which] alludes to an insular and at times stifling childhood, the excitement and challenges Luna experienced in the fashion world [and] her move to Europe" and how as a biracial woman, these "societal forces conspired to render Black women INVISIBLE" versus her VISIBLE LIFE, which is heavily present throughout the work in the motifs of VISIONS (her spiritual visions as other Black women in history in her writings she refers to as Future Visioning) and "succumbing to VISUAL MISTAKES" (her desire to achieve her own form of beauty which she considered her art, such as modeling photographs or films) due to her conflicting position as a biracial woman in her environment in her career.

She was also noted for defying the usual body type portrayed in the magazine of more "voluptuous" women with her smaller build, placing more emphasis on her spiritual "visions" which occurred on her photography shoots such as in Playboy.

Bill Cunningham described watching the experience as how "Her body moves like a panther, her arms, the wings of an exotic bird, the long neck suggests a black trumpet swan.

[97] Luna also appeared in the feature length Camp in 1965, Warhol's "satire of his own world" where she dances to the Ramsey Lewis Trio instrumental "The 'In' Crowd" wearing a backless dress and fur stole.

The American photographer William Claxton introduced Luna to Dalí when he met her in Catalonian village of Cadaqués, becoming Dali's lifelong muse whom he would refer to as "the reincarnation of Nefertiti".

[11] Artworks show how she would stand on a half-submerged piano which Dali has submerged himself for her to stand on, Claxton shooting "Dali drawing impromptu traceries on Luna's body" (a line art piece on a cream dress) while she wore it or emerging from a human-sized egg full of red paint which made into an 1 hour long surrealist film being "a scriptless series of happenings, all centred on images of birth and creativity" in plastic costumes designed by Paco Rabanne.

Luna used camp to give off a larger than life character, using hairpieces, lengthened eyelashes, and "a collection of blue, green, yellow, purple and orange [colored contacts] ... which she changed like underwear" to play fast and loose with defined boundaries she may have had as Peggy-Ann.

[108] The alter ego of Donyale Luna was created in what Freeman termed future visioning, a New Age approach culminating when she attended Central High Theater in Detroit.

[115] For instance in her "primitive" shoot with Harper's Bazaar dressed in animal print in 1965, Luna "construct[s] and perform[s] an oppositional Black glamour" by using the provided clothes or "[tangible] things ... [to] interpellate [her audience] in specific ways, combining narrative with history and materiality to structure specific gestures and movements ... [in] working with her own effective engagement with the material as "dances with things", undoing the work of glamour as a white racial project", thus creating an aspirational lifestyle for potential Black audiences.

[19] And with "her gesticular poses in print magazines emphasized her angular frame, while her assertive body language—including a powerful stare called "the Look" by fashion magazines and later described as "ocular assault" ... became her signature [pose]" used to entrance her audience, Freeman used "Donyale" to create an altogether new image or aesthetic of what constituted Black glamour, a new beauty paradigm for African-American visual imagery and Black subject agency; developed from Baker's era of primitive glamour; into previously white spaces.

... [Finding it amazing how Luna] was to leave home for Manhattan at that point in history, with no clear plans or steady income - just a telephone number hastily written down by a stranger.

[35] As for the United States, "until the advent of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s the fashion industry operated its own kind of apartheid, which entirely excluded non-white models from its magazines, advertising and catwalk shows.

Due to the color barrier, by then "the prestige of her modeling jobs had now shifted, from photo editorial work for Harper's Bazaar to the secondary ... advertising market [in Ebony magazine]".

[22] Dazed reporter Phillipa Burton notes how it today "makes for uncomfortable reading; the interviewer's obsessive probing of her multiracial lineage jarring with Luna's obvious displeasure at talking about it.

"[15] When Stone asked her about whether her appearances in Hollywood films would benefit the cause of Black actresses, Luna replied, "If it brings about more jobs for Mexicans, Asians, Native Americans, Africans, groovy.

I couldn't care less"[35][47] which are indicative of the limited and poor quality of jobs and opportunities available to Luna at the time in an environment which seemingly only accepted models who passed the brown paper bag test.

By 1974 having not found full acceptance in Europe either, she was "caught between the insinuating effects of racial/cultural renunciation [and] sexual stereotype ... Luna's response was to wear the mask [of one of Giacometti's skeletal sculptures] and ... to become a negligible component of life, hovering between existence and nothingness" in Italy in the public eye.

From this time on, she had problems figuring out who she was as a Black woman eventually becoming a "soul on ice": an entity encased and obscured by its own false image, which only hinted at the naked power and creative potential that lay beneath the surface", or a shell of the former aspirations she held in her identity in youth.

[142] Since her death, Donyale Luna's March 1966 British Vogue cover has been hailed as opening doors for Black models and normalising the inclusion of African-American and African-Europeans on magazines previously catering to majority white demographics.

Phillipa Burton wrote in 2009, how "clean-cut models like Beverly Johnson and Iman, whose lives were not to end murkily through an overzealous use of heroin, were louder and prouder ambassadors of the "Black is beautiful" message.

[2] Luna is usually today therefore regarded as "a key player in the mid- to late 1960s fashion, film, and experimental theater scenes" who by the 1970s was "unable to move beyond the external and self-imposed limitations for someone of her idiosyncratic temperamental and tenuous lifestyle ... [which] united to diminish and obscure her once impressive figure, which then led to her public erasure".[147]".