Dressing Up in the Latest Fashionable Cause?

The money raised by the Red-labeled goods benefits the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, which was created in 2002. Originally, it was conceived as a partnership between governments and private industry. But after almost four years, governments had committed $10 billion, Shriver says, and the private sector had donated $2 million -- almost nothing in comparison.

"If it didn't work, it would have been seen as a bait and switch," he says. "Governments could have taken the view, 'You told me this and it didn't happen.' If you looked downfield, you knew that argument was going to come."

In the first five months of the Red project, which debuted in England, it has raised $10 million.

Iman also is being a realist. Might the celebrities who posed for portraits have their own agendas? Could their participation have to do with a desire to burnish their own image? Certainly. But if "celebrities can do something for Africa, why should I care what their agendas are?" she says.

"I picked them. I felt they didn't put their face with too many charities, and I wanted different age groups," Iman says. "None of them asked me to sign anything. I said, 'I'll protect your image as if your life depended on it.'

"We're force-fed celebrities: what they wear, how much they eat, how much they don't eat," she says. But those images sell magazines, raise ratings and get people talking. What if that same amount of attention could be directed to the AIDS epidemic in Africa? "I say use anybody, by all means necessary."

Iman, who was honored Monday night as one of Glamour magazine's women of the year for her AIDS work, grew up in Somalia as the daughter of a diplomat. But she also spent time as a refugee in neighboring Kenya after civil upheaval forced her family to leave their home. "I saw firsthand what the nongovernmental organization could do," she says. "They don't care about politics. They're out to help the people."

Keep a Child Alive's annual fundraiser, the Black Ball, is next Thursday at New York City's Hammerstein Ballroom, with performances by Keyes and Bowie, among others. The goal is to raise $2 million.