John-Michael O'Sullivan

2018 sees research for ‘The Replacement Girl’ shift to Barbara Mullen’s later career, in London and Paris. And so the second group of stories to be told are those of Barbara’s French and British contemporaries — women like Anne Gunning, perhaps the first real British supermodel, who took America by storm a decade before Twiggy and the Shrimp. ‘She has been everything that girls dream about when they dream of becoming top models.’ a journalist wrote in 1961, on the eve of Anne Gunning's marriage — ironically, given that Gunning had never dreamt of being a model herself. As a teenager, whilst still studying at LAMDA, she won the 1949 London Films Cup. for acting talent. Billed in the press as a ‘taller edition of Vivien Leigh’, she was signed up to a ten-year Rank movie contract, and given small parts in romantic comedies like ‘The Gay Lady’, ‘Helter-Skelter’ and Noël Coward’s ‘The Astonished Heart’. Then she landed what should have been her breakout role — as a tragically-widowed young woman in Lance Comfort’s ‘Portrait of Clare’. Gunning looks ravishing in the film (“Certainly she is of a beauty calculated to disturb the even tenor of the thought.” one writer confessed, “and make the heart go pitter-patter of any middle aged gent.”) But there was a gravity about how she moved, and spoke, that always made her seem remote on screen. It would take the fixed glare of fashion photography to bring Gunning unforgettably to life. In 1948, Henry Clarke first spotted the young actress in a restaurant on the Kings Road. He asked her to pose for him; she accepted, and began to do small assignments here and there on the side, for Clarke, John French and Dick Dormer. And as her film career stalled, she quietly developed into one of London’s top models — a regular fixture in Vogue’s British and French editions, and the star of US Vogue’s 1952 couture shoots. “I was very lucky,” she admitted. “I started bang off, no training, no model schools. And this was really due to meeting Henry and Dick, two very good photographers. I didn’t have to do that awful thing of taking my photographs around, knocking on studio doors for work. I could never have done that.” That success was all forgotten, however, in 1953, when American photographer Milton Greene ‘discovered’ Gunning — shooting her in amongst castle ruins in a Sybil Connolly gown and cape. It made the cover of LIFE, alongside the headline IRISH INVADE FASHION WORLD. Suddenly, five years after she’d started, Gunning found herself an overnight sensation. She charmed the New York fashion world — scoring key advertising campaigns, working with the cream of the city’s photographers, and knocking her American contemporaries off the cover of every major magazine. Connolly even used her as the template for the miniature washerwoman dolls she sold in U.S. department stores for St. Patrick’s Day that year; the perfect Irish beauty. In fact, Gunning wasn’t Irish at all — unless you apply the Irish football team’s famously relaxed eligibility standards. Her mother had been brought up in Belfast, whilst her father’s family were from Sussex (albeit proud of a distant Irish heritage, that claimed a link to famed eighteenth-century society beauties Maria and Elizabeth Gunning). Helen Anne Parker had actually been born in Southern Rhodesia, where her father was a coffee planter, and then raised by an aunt in England after her parents split up. But the Irish angle (and the Gunning connection) gave her story a romantic frisson — whilst rumoured relationships with Oleg Cassini and Colin Tennant ensured frequent appearances in gossip columns all over the world. For the next eight years, Gunning enjoyed exceptional success. Whilst she remained based in London (in an all-white John Siddeley-designed apartment in Belgravia), there were repeat return-trips to America, and regular stints in Paris; there were lucrative commercial campaigns, for everyone from Hermes to Sears, and prestigious location shoots. And there was the uniquely intimate bond she formed with Richard Dormer — a decade-long pas-de-deux between photographer and model that kept her in the spotlight long after most of her rivals had retired.' There was even a brief return to movies, shortly before her marriage to Sir Anthony Nutting, with a blink-and-miss appearance alongside Laurence Harvey in ‘Room at the Top’; another cameo, as another beautiful, inevitably distant woman.“Warm yet remote, her incandescent beauty glows in a camera lens.” John French said of her, “but she keeps the secret of her smile.”

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/Gunning.jpg?v=1690909713" width="392">



 2018 sees research for ‘The Replacement Girl’ shift to Barbara Mullen’s later career, in London and Paris. And so the second group of stories to be told are those of Barbara’s French and British contemporaries — women like Anne Gunning, perhaps the first real British supermodel, who took America by storm a decade before Twiggy and the Shrimp.


    ‘She has been everything that girls dream about when they dream of becoming top models.’ a journalist wrote in 1961, on the eve of Anne Gunning's marriage — ironically, given that Gunning had never dreamt of being a model herself. As a teenager, whilst still studying at LAMDA, she won the 1949 London Films Cup. for acting talent. Billed in the press as a ‘taller edition of Vivien Leigh’, she was signed up to a ten-year Rank movie contract, and given small parts in romantic comedies like ‘The Gay Lady’, ‘Helter-Skelter’ and Noël Coward’s ‘The Astonished Heart’. Then she landed what should have been her breakout role — as a tragically-widowed young woman in Lance Comfort’s ‘Portrait of Clare’. Gunning looks ravishing in the film (“Certainly she is of a beauty calculated to disturb the even tenor of the thought.” one writer confessed, “and make the heart go pitter-patter of any middle aged gent.”) But there was a gravity about how she moved, and spoke, that always made her seem remote on screen. It would take the fixed glare of fashion photography to bring Gunning unforgettably to life.

     In 1948, Henry Clarke first spotted the young actress in a restaurant on the Kings Road. He asked her to pose for him; she accepted, and began to do small assignments here and there on the side, for Clarke, John French and Dick Dormer. And as her film career stalled, she quietly developed into one of London’s top models — a regular fixture in Vogue’s British and French editions, and the star of US Vogue’s 1952 couture shoots. “I was very lucky,” she admitted. “I started bang off, no training, no model schools. And this was really due to meeting Henry and Dick, two very good photographers. I didn’t have to do that awful thing of taking my photographs around, knocking on studio doors for work. I could never have done that.”

     That success was all forgotten, however, in 1953, when American photographer Milton Greene ‘discovered’ Gunning — shooting her in amongst castle ruins in a Sybil Connolly gown and cape. It made the cover of LIFE, alongside the headline IRISH INVADE FASHION WORLD. Suddenly, five years after she’d started, Gunning found herself an overnight sensation. She charmed the New York fashion world — scoring key advertising campaigns, working with the cream of the city’s photographers, and knocking her American contemporaries off the cover of every major magazine. Connolly even used her as the template for the miniature washerwoman dolls she sold in U.S. department stores for St. Patrick’s Day that year; the perfect Irish beauty.

    In fact, Gunning wasn’t Irish at all — unless you apply the Irish football team’s famously relaxed eligibility standards. Her mother had been brought up in Belfast, whilst her father’s family were from Sussex (albeit proud of  a distant Irish heritage, that claimed a link to  famed eighteenth-century society beauties Maria and Elizabeth Gunning). Helen Anne Parker had actually been born in Southern Rhodesia, where her father was a coffee planter, and then raised by an aunt in England after her parents split up. But the Irish angle (and the Gunning connection) gave her story a romantic frisson — whilst rumoured relationships with Oleg Cassini and Colin Tennant ensured frequent appearances in gossip columns all over the world.

    For the next eight years, Gunning enjoyed exceptional success. Whilst she remained based in London (in an all-white John Siddeley-designed apartment in Belgravia), there were repeat return-trips to America, and regular stints in Paris; there were lucrative commercial campaigns, for everyone from Hermes to Sears, and prestigious location shoots. And there was the uniquely intimate bond she formed with Richard Dormer — a decade-long pas-de-deux between photographer and model that kept her in the spotlight long after most of her rivals had retired.' There was even a brief return to movies, shortly before her marriage to Sir Anthony Nutting, with a blink-and-miss appearance alongside Laurence Harvey in ‘Room at the Top’; another cameo, as another beautiful, inevitably distant woman.“Warm yet remote, her incandescent beauty glows in a camera lens.” John French said of her, “but she keeps the secret of her smile.”

Anne Gunning, 1954

You can’t have a good Cinderella story without having an ugly sister somewhere in the frame. In Barbara Mullen’s particular fairytale, that role falls to Bijou Barrington — a glamour girl whose career contrasts with that of Mullen in almost every significant way. Of course, in reality Bijou Barrington wasn’t remotely ugly. Like most models of the early Forties, she was uncomplicatedly, film-star-perfect gorgeous; a poised, tanned, elegant blonde with a dazzling toothpaste smile. From 1939 onwards, she was one of Manhattan’s most in-demand names, working regularly with the likes of Horst, John Rawlings and Louise Dahl-Wolfe. In 1944, a youngster called Dick Avedon splashed his entire army discharge to book Barrington (then the city's highest paid model) for a session; he sold the pictures that resulted to Bonwit Teller, and within a few years had risen to the top of his field. Although born only a few years apart, Barrington and Mullen inhabited entirely different worlds. Mullen spent her childhood in Depression-era Harlem, whilst Barrington travelled the world with her concert pianist mother; Mullen left high school to work in a local beauty parlour, whilst Barrington won a studio contract with RKO. (Born Erica Barrington, the studio rechristened her Diane, before model agent John Robert Powers rebranded her as Bijou, to join a stable which included pin-up stars like Chilli Williams, Jinx Falkenberg and Choo Choo Johnson.) And where Mullen was largely unknown during her long career, Barrington was a gossip column darling; a room-mate of the equally infamous Dorian Leigh, with whom she challenged the reigning agency system by setting up a model agency of their own. Her hectic love life (married three times in one decade, twice to the same man) was played out in Manhattan’s starriest nightclubs — and every twist and turn was breathlessly reported on by gossip columnists like Walter Winchell, Cholly Knickerbocker and Dorothy Kilgallen. But in 1947 (in a somewhat less reported twist), just as her career was at its zenith, Barrington was replaced on a Vogue shoot by a novice. It wasn’t her fault; designer Mark Mooring had been working with Barbara Mullen for almost two years, and cut all his gowns to fit her like a glove. But Mullen was a new kind of shape; beanpole-tall, and impossibly slim — even by model standards. Barrington simply couldn't get the dress on. Normally, editors would have improvised their way out of the problem, pulling garments together with clips and pins. The particular gown Vogue had called in, however, had to be photographed from the back to show off its detail. So Barrington was cancelled, and Mullen was hunted down in the staff quarters Bergdorf Goodman to take her place. It's not quite All About Eve, but her debut feels in retrospect it like a changing of the guard; Barrington's soft curves giving way to hard angles, and glamour being dropped for a more extreme aesthetic that Vogue trumpeted as ‘The New Beauty’. And that was that. With the year, Mullen was one of the modelling world’s new stars, while Barrington faded into the background. The tail-end of her career (still faithfully followed by the newspapers) dogged by divorce, illness and accidents; the studio contracts never amounted to more than the occasional walk-on, and her death in the early Sixties passed unremarked. Bijou Barrington's name is largely forgotten now, apart from her part in triggering Barbara Mullen's career. Her only crime was that of having incarnated her era so perfectly — an era, unlike Mullen's, which feels utterly removed from today.

Bijou Barrington, 1942

Barbara Mullen spent two years as a department store mannequin before getting her first break at Vogue. But some women would spend their entire careers working in ready-to-wear showrooms and couture salons — none more famously than Hartnell model Dolores, who reigned over London’s fashion scene for two decades. She wasn’t Norman Hartnell’s first Dolores. That honour fell to Norine Schofield, who’d picked the name herself, and was already a famous artist’s model by the time she walked in the designer’s first show. And on the other side of the Atlantic, there was another Dolores — aka Kathleen Rose, another Londoner who’d become a global sensation as the star of the Ziegfeld Follies. But Dorothy Stephenson of Bromley didn’t have a choice. When she came to meet Hartnell at his Bruton Street atelier in the mid-thirties, she told him her name. “He winced,” she later remembered, “and said. 'Right, you can start on Monday. And from now on your name is Dolores.'.” Stephenson had studied art as a teenager, but came to realise that she would never excel in the field, and enrolled herself at a modelling school instead. She struggled to find work initially, and was sacked from her first job. But at Hartnell’s she found a lasting home, her exotic looks adding drama to his demurely feminine designs. And the name change was nothing unusual, in an era when couturiers rechristened their house models as a matter of course; Gigi, Bettina, Praline. “It’s a hard name to live up to.” was Stephenson's only complaint. “People expect extra polish.” During the war, she put her art training to good use by working as a factory draughtsman, but returned to Hartnell afterwards. “She’s always been decorative and hard working.” he said approvingly of his long-serving employee. “Dolores takes delight in arriving every morning looking almost frightening without a speck of make-up, to emerge at 10 o’clock in full rig . . . her funny face becomes heavy with cosmetics, and the wisps of black hair have been augmented by a strapping plait and a hefty bun of jet-black hair which I bought for her at some expense.” Stephenson, on the other hand, put her success down to “enthusiasm, and a pair of very sound feet. It’s not by any means an easy life. You don’t merely put on a dress and walk around. You must have dramatic talent. Your personality must capture attention, not for yourself but for the clothes you are wearing.” After the war, Stephenson became Hartnell’s de facto ambassador — travelling the world to show off his clothes, doing TV appearances, judging regional beauty contests and opening boutiques on his behalf. she also wrote beauty and style columns, and gave regular interviews on the world of fashion. “I’ve seen dozens of trends come and go,” she told one interviewer sagely. “and I am quite convinced there is no more accurate barometer of world condition than women’s clothes. “There has never been anyone quite like Dolores for interpreting the Hartnell story,” The Observer’s Alison Adburgham wrote in the Fifties, “while yet bringing warmth and human kindliness to what so often appears superficially an aloof, unkindly calling.” In newspapers, Stephenson was universally proclaimed ageless. But she was always more clear-eyed; “Your days at this game are numbered. What comes after that? For myself, I’m too scraggy to start modelling middle-aged styles.” Finally, in December 1955, by then in her mid-forties, she retired and emigrated to South Africa. It seemed an abrupt move for a woman whose whole life had revolved round Hartnell and his work — a woman who’d never married, and never moved out of the family home; who’d lived frugally, always making her own clothes, and spending her lunch breaks bargain shopping. (Years later, rumours hinted that she’d become infuriated at the arrival of a new favourite, Cynthia Oberholzer. “If she stays, I go”. Stephenson allegedly raged.) But that was all behind closed doors. On her final day, she simply said; “I will stroke every wall and kiss every door goodbye.” She took one last bow, in a bright-yellow ballgown, at another royal show in Hamilton House. “We are all going to miss you very much.” the Queen Mother confided as they said their goodbyes. “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/aceeefce-3ac0-40c5-8e2b-e32fb26ad6ac-2060x1236.jpg?v=1690909721" width="392">



 Barbara Mullen spent two years as a department store mannequin before getting her first break at Vogue. But some women would spend their entire careers working in ready-to-wear showrooms and couture salons — none more famously than Hartnell model Dolores, who reigned over London’s fashion scene for two decades.


She wasn’t Norman Hartnell’s first Dolores. That honour fell to Norine Schofield, who’d picked the name herself, and was already a famous artist’s model by the time she walked in the designer’s first show. And on the other side of the Atlantic, there was another Dolores — aka Kathleen Rose, another Londoner who’d become a global sensation as the star of the  Ziegfeld Follies. But Dorothy Stephenson of Bromley didn’t have a choice. When she came to meet Hartnell at his Bruton Street atelier in the mid-thirties, she told him her name. “He winced,” she later remembered, “and said. 'Right, you can start on Monday. And from now on your name is Dolores.'.”

Stephenson had studied art as a teenager, but came to realise that she would never excel in the field, and enrolled herself at a modelling school instead. She struggled to find work initially, and was sacked from her first job. But at Hartnell’s she found a lasting home, her exotic looks adding drama to his demurely feminine designs. And the name change was nothing unusual, in an era when couturiers rechristened their house models as a matter of course; Gigi, Bettina, Praline. “It’s a hard name to live up to.” was Stephenson's only complaint. “People expect extra polish.” 

During the war, she put her art training to good use by working as a factory draughtsman, but returned to Hartnell afterwards. “She’s always been decorative and hard working.” he said approvingly of his long-serving employee. “Dolores takes delight in arriving every morning looking almost frightening without a speck of make-up, to emerge at 10 o’clock in full rig . . . her funny face becomes heavy with cosmetics, and the wisps of black hair have been augmented by a strapping plait and a hefty bun of jet-black hair which I bought for her at some expense.” Stephenson, on the other hand, put her success down to “enthusiasm, and a pair of very sound feet. It’s not by any means an easy life. You don’t merely put on a dress and walk around. You must have dramatic talent. Your personality must capture attention, not for yourself but for the clothes you are wearing.”

After the war, Stephenson became Hartnell’s de facto ambassador — travelling the world to show off his clothes, doing TV appearances, judging regional beauty contests and opening boutiques on his behalf. she also wrote beauty and style columns, and gave regular interviews on the world of fashion. “I’ve seen dozens of trends come and go,” she told one interviewer sagely. “and I am quite convinced there is no more accurate barometer of world condition than women’s clothes. “There has never been anyone quite like Dolores for interpreting the Hartnell story,” The Observer’s Alison Adburgham wrote in the Fifties, “while yet bringing warmth and human kindliness to what so often appears superficially an aloof, unkindly calling.”

In newspapers, Stephenson was universally proclaimed ageless. But she was always more clear-eyed; “Your days at this game are numbered. What comes after that? For myself, I’m too scraggy to start modelling middle-aged styles.” Finally, in December 1955, by then in her mid-forties, she retired and emigrated to South Africa. It seemed an abrupt move for a woman whose whole life had revolved round Hartnell and his work — a woman who’d never married, and never moved out of the family home; who’d lived frugally, always making her own clothes, and spending her lunch breaks bargain shopping. (Years later, rumours hinted that she’d become infuriated at the arrival of a new favourite, Cynthia Oberholzer. “If she stays, I go”. Stephenson allegedly raged.) 

But that was all behind closed doors. On her final day, she simply said; “I will stroke every wall and kiss every door goodbye.” She took one last bow, in a bright-yellow ballgown, at another royal show in Hamilton House. “We are all going to miss you very much.” the Queen Mother confided as they said their goodbyes. “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

Dolores, 1955

Jean Dawnay, 1957 Most of the women whose lives I’ve featured (both here, and — in more condensed form — on Instagram) had neither the profile or the platform to share their perspectives. Jean Dawnay was the exception; a household name with a glittering career, who seized the chance to tell her side of the story. In what’s perhaps the most famous picture ever taken of her, Jean Dawnay stands triumphantly in the centre of the frame. She looks every inch the star; white mink slung round her Norman Hartnell gown, a champagne bottle swinging from one hand, and a glass raised to toast the photographer in the other. Dawnay’s victory was all the sweeter given that it had been one earned over several long years of slogging — and give that her success had been deemed unlikely from the outset. “You’re quite nice, dear, but rather ordinary.” one agent told her when she first began to do the rounds. “I’d try something else if I were you.” If the advice was meant to discourage, it backfired. ‘My fair hair was fuzzy from cheap perms,’ Dawnay conceded, “my eyebrows ragged and ungroomed, my two front teeth were crossed and ‘rabbity’, my cheeks too plump, and my makeup did nothing for me.” But instead of giving up, she persisted — fixing her teeth, restyling her hair, and losing weight. Slowly, as months went by, she began to pick up assignments. And in 1949, with nothing to lose, she struck out for Paris. She might have hoped for more of the same odd jobs. But instead, she was picked to join the city’s most successful couture house, Christian Dior. ‘I chose ‘Caroline’ (there was already a Jean on the staff),’ the designer explained, ‘for her essential Englishness — she had blue eyes, golden hair, and a slender, graceful figure.’ Dawnay only modelled for Dior for a single season. But it did the trick; when she returned to London, she was anointed a star. (‘Even the local butcher had a picture up me,’ she laughed. ‘stuck up behind the carcasses.’) A steady stream of editorial and advertising success followed, as well as successful international tours to Australia, Italy and New. But Dawnay, practical as ever, was thinking ahead. “I realised that I must start thinking of giving up modelling before it gave me up.” she reflected. “No glove has ever felt to discarded as a discarded model.” So, on the side, she became a TV regular, on popular shows like ‘Café Continental’ and ‘What’s My Line’ (“People seem astonished to find that models can be human and animated.” she marvelled.). And in the autumn of 1955, she published ‘Model Girl’ — a breezy, but unvarnished, canter through her career. The book was an instant, resounding success, offering readers a rare insght into the workings of the fashion world. And Dawnay continued to add strings to her bow — appearing on stage in the West End, as a dope addict for San Wanaker’s ‘A Hatful of Rain’ , and on screen as the adventurous society girl who falls for Frankie Vaughan in ‘Wonderful Things!’ Hollywood offers followed, including an opportunity to make ‘Model Girl’ into a film. "But they wanted to add a love interest." she sighed crossly. "Which would just have been silly." Instead, she became an adviser to Marks & Spencer, and in 1963, after years as a walking advertisement for glamorous single life, married Prince George Galitzine. For the next half-century, the Galitzines lived in an elegant flat on Eaton Square. I spent an afternoon there, in 2014, interviewing the Princess about her life. Her eyesight was failing badly by then, and she was clearly frustrated by its loss. But she was a charming, engaging hostess, regaling me with wine and cake and tales of her eventful life — the peripatetic childhood, spent shuttled from home to home after her mother’s death; the war years spent in a parachute factory, and then as part of the Baker Street coding team; the postwar years spent as a Brigadier’s assistant supervising Germany’s reconstruction. ("There were men everywhere." she twinkled. "But I was Caesar’s daughter, you see. So I was PERFECTLY safe!"); her long, affectionate relationship with Terence Rattigan, who lived across the square from her, and who used her love-life as source material for Separate Tables; her charity work, at home and in Russia; and her adored daughter and grandson. When I’d finished taking notes, Dawnay asked me whether I’d help her write a follow-up to her biography; her original publishers were interested, and she simply needed someone to dictate to. But by then I’d already committed to Barbara Mullen’s story. So all I could do, to my eternal regret, was suggest I could try to help when my current project was done. Five years later, ‘The Replacement Girl’ has ballooned into something more complicated that I could ever have imagined. And Dawnay is dead, without having told the rest of her story. It’s a real shame: as with everything else she did in her life, she’d have carried it off magnificently.

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/DawnayJean.jpg?v=1690909724" width="376">



 Jean Dawnay, 1957



 Most of the women whose lives I’ve featured (both here, and — in more condensed form — on Instagram) had neither the profile or the platform to share their perspectives. Jean Dawnay was the exception; a household name with a glittering career, who seized the chance to tell her side of the story.


In what’s perhaps the most famous picture ever taken of her, Jean Dawnay stands triumphantly in the centre of the frame. She looks every inch the star; white mink slung round her Norman Hartnell gown, a champagne bottle swinging from one hand, and a glass raised to toast the photographer in the other.

Dawnay’s victory was all the sweeter given that it had been one earned over several long years of slogging — and give that her success had been deemed unlikely from the outset. “You’re quite nice, dear, but rather ordinary.” one agent told her when she first began to do the rounds. “I’d try something else if I were you.”

If the advice was meant to discourage, it backfired. ‘My fair hair was fuzzy from cheap perms,’ Dawnay conceded, “my eyebrows ragged and ungroomed, my two front teeth were crossed and ‘rabbity’, my cheeks too plump, and my makeup did nothing for me.” But instead of giving up, she persisted — fixing her teeth, restyling her hair, and losing weight. Slowly, as months went by, she began to pick up assignments. And in 1949, with nothing to lose, she struck out for Paris.

She might have hoped for more of the same odd jobs. But instead, she was picked to join the city’s most successful couture house, Christian Dior. ‘I chose ‘Caroline’ (there was already a Jean on the staff),’ the designer explained, ‘for her essential Englishness — she had blue eyes, golden hair, and a slender, graceful figure.’ 

Dawnay only modelled for Dior for a single season. But it did the trick; when she returned to London, she was anointed a star. (‘Even the local butcher had a picture up me,’ she laughed. ‘stuck up behind the carcasses.’) A steady stream of editorial and advertising success followed, as well as successful international tours to Australia, Italy and New. But Dawnay, practical as ever, was thinking ahead. 

“I realised that I must start thinking of giving up modelling before it gave me up.” she reflected. “No glove has ever felt to discarded as a discarded model.” So, on the side, she became a TV regular, on popular shows like ‘Café Continental’ and ‘What’s My Line’ (“People seem astonished to find that models can be human and animated.” she marvelled.). And in the autumn of 1955, she published ‘Model Girl’ — a breezy, but unvarnished, canter through her career. 

The book was an instant, resounding success, offering readers a rare insght into the workings of the fashion world. And Dawnay continued to add strings to her bow — appearing on stage in the West End, as a dope addict for San Wanaker’s ‘A Hatful of Rain’ , and on screen as the adventurous society girl who falls for Frankie Vaughan in ‘Wonderful Things!’ Hollywood offers followed, including an opportunity to make ‘Model Girl’ into a film. "But they wanted to add a love interest." she sighed crossly. "Which would just have been silly." Instead, she became an adviser to Marks &amp; Spencer, and in 1963, after years as a walking advertisement for glamorous single life, married Prince George Galitzine.

For the next half-century, the Galitzines lived in an elegant flat on Eaton Square. I spent an afternoon there, in 2014, interviewing the Princess about her life. Her eyesight was failing badly by then, and she was clearly frustrated by its loss. But she was a charming, engaging hostess, regaling me with wine and cake and tales of her eventful life — the peripatetic childhood, spent shuttled from home to home after her mother’s death; the war years spent in a parachute factory, and then as part of the Baker Street coding team; the postwar years spent as a Brigadier’s assistant supervising Germany’s reconstruction. ("There were men everywhere." she twinkled. "But I was Caesar’s daughter, you see. So I was PERFECTLY safe!"); her long, affectionate relationship with Terence Rattigan, who lived across the square from her, and who used her love-life as source material for Separate Tables; her charity work, at home and in Russia; and her adored daughter and grandson.

When I’d finished taking notes, Dawnay asked me whether I’d help her write a follow-up to her biography; her original publishers were interested, and she simply needed someone to dictate to. But by then I’d already committed to Barbara Mullen’s story. So all I could do, to my eternal regret, was suggest I could try to help when my current project was done. 

Five years later, ‘The Replacement Girl’ has ballooned into something more complicated that I could ever have imagined. And Dawnay is dead, without having told the rest of her story. It’s a real shame: as with everything else she did in her life, she’d have carried it off magnificently.

Jean Dawnay, 1957

Barbara Mullen chose a modelling career; Jeanne Florin tried to avoid it. But despite that, she became one of the most sought-after models in Paris — and, with her husband William Klein, would form one of photography’s most enduring partnerships. It’s one of fashion’s great love stories. It even comes with a beginning straight out of an MGM musical; a handsome young American soldier, cycling through grey postwar Paris, sees a beautiful French girl. He stops, and asks for directions; they meet the next day, marry the next year, and live happily ever after. William Klein was a radio operator from Brooklyn, who’d come to Paris to enrol at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts; Jeanne Florin was half-French, half-Flemish, from a strict, vaguely aristocratic family of Catholics. When they met, she’d been studying Russian and sculpture — but they quickly became a single force, collaborating on photography, painting and film-making for almost six decades. The city that acted as backdrop to William and Jeanne’s love affair was still devastated by the Occupation and its aftermath. But its fashion industry was coming back to life, aided by the American editors and buyers who remembered pre-war Paris — and who viewed its bomb-scarred streets and boarded-up frontages through a mist of rose-tinted nostalgia. And with them came a swarm of magazine photographers, hungry for new faces. “My wife was incredibly beautiful,” Klein remembers, “and people would stop her on the street. They would say, ‘Why don’t you go to Vogue and do photographs?’ And she was from this semi-aristocratic family and she thought that was very vulgar, and being a model was not something she thought was cool.” Jeanne wasn’t alone in thinking the opportunity wasn’t ‘cool’; in America, it was fast becoming a glamorous (and lucrative) career, but for most French women modelling was still a far from respectable way to earn a living. Klein was struggling to survive on his painting, though, so Jeanne gave in to the inevitable. She became a regular supporting player in the big international magazines, her pale skin, austerely-parted hair and heavy-lidded eyes adding a hint of exotic Parisian elegance to their couture reports. Clifford Coffin shot her alongside Fiona Campbell-Walter for Vogue in 1948, her slender frame rising out of a grey Balenciaga velvet and silk gown; the following spring, Lillian Bassman used her in Harper's Bazaar, lurking in the shadows behind Barbara Mullen; in 1951, Henry Clarke paired her with the blonde Nina de Voogt for Vogue Paris, and in 1952 she returned to Bazaar for Karen Radkai. In between, she worked regularly for Robert Doisneau, Georges Saad, the Seeberger Fréres and Philippe Pottier — and once with Richard Avedon, who offered her and William $500 for a shot of the two of them kissing in front of Sacré Coeur. The camera adored Jeanne Klein’s languid lines and delicate features. But Jeanne never loved it back. When Klein began to achieve success as a photographer in the mid fifties, she happily retired . She made a single appearance on screen, with William, as a couple from the future in Chris Marker’s seminal sci-fi film La Jetée. She raised their son, Pierre (now a film-maker himself). And she painted, for pleasure. But that’s all what we know, mainly because of what Klein himself has said. Janine Klein was publicly silent for most of her life. We know only that she admired Coffin (“He was the only photographer who wasn't pretentious,” she wrote to his biographer, “and certainly never ' difficult’.” ) She acted as costume designer on two Klein’s films, parodying the high-fashion world she’d been a reluctant part of in Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo? and embracing all-out Pop Art kitsch in Mr. Freedom. It’s perhaps only through these that the woman Klein called ‘ma complice, ma conspiratrice’ is visible — a woman who, in their family pictures, is always animated and laughing, her hair cropped short or slicked into a no-nonsense bun. But whenever Klein mentions her in interviews, she reverts to being the fairytale apparition he met in Forties Paris. The year after he died, in an interview with Paris Match, he sighed “Tout ce que j’ai enterpris, je l’ai fait pour elle.”;“Everything I did, I did for her.”

Jeanne Klein, 1948

Joan Pedersen grew up dreaming about dancing. But fate led her to modelling instead, and to a successful career that flew largely under history’s radar. World’s Oldest Living Cover Girl. It’s a title that rests lightly on the shoulders with Joan Pedersen Coleman, an elegant, chatty 93-year-old, who first graced the cover of Vogue seventy years ago — and did so in some style, appearing on three covers in as many months. In late June, sprawled across grass, she recreated Manet’s Déjeuner sur l'herbe for illustrator René Bouché; a month later, Dick Rutledge photographed her as a giggling debutante, her springy blonde curls cloaked by a lace parasol; and at the start of September, she posed in a sweeping Balenciaga coat, suddenly serious for Irving Penn. For models nowadays (unless you’re a Kardashian, or a Hadid) that level of newsstand exposure is practically unheard of. And where it does happen, it signals the arrival of a star. But Joan Pedersen’s story got lost somewhere between then and now, squeezed out of history by the glamorous goddesses who’d gone before her in the Thirties — and the sharply elegant midcentury ice-queens who followed in her wake. Born in New Jersey in 1924, Pedersen was the daughter of a Norwegian chauffeur, who’d immigrated to the US as a teenager, and married a Swedish girl. As a child, she fell in love with dancing, and won a scholarship to study at a Manhattan ballet school. But by her mid-teens, she had rocketed up to 5’ 8” in height, and had to leave those dreams behind; instead, she registered with Harry Conover, one of New York’s most powerful model agencies, and found steady work in the city’s showrooms. One of her most regular clients was Mainbocher — at the time considered perhaps the supreme American designer. She got her first Vogue booking wearing one of his outfits, switched to the Ford Agency, and quickly became a photographers’ favourite. As well as Rutledge and Penn, she worked with the likes of Halsmann, Leen, Horst, and Avedon, appearing in LIFE, Vogue and Bazaar. (“Oh, Dick was SUCH fun!”, she sighs, remembering sittings where the young photographer would keep her amused by singing the latest Broadway hits.) And she was taken to Paris by Serge Balkin to photograph the couture collections in 1947 — another accolade that few of her contemporaries would ever achieve. In parallel with her modelling career, Pedersen had continued to dance whenever she could. She appeared in the chorus of The Boys from Boise, the first-ever televised musical, and toured Europe in the last months of the war with the USO’s Copacacana Revue. But like most women of her time, Pedersen also dreamt of marriage. “What girl doesn’t?” she told a reporter in 1948. “When I see the guy I want I’ll know it — and he’ll know it too.” Not long after, Pedersen finally spotted the guy she wanted; she married him a year later, but within a few months had figured out that he wasn’t her Prince Charming after all. Pregnant, she returned to her parents in New Jersey, and settled back to work. She continued to book regular photographic assignments, but her dance background made her a natural choice for runway shows — a lucrative (and steady) alternative, in an era when the American public’s appetite for fashion was on the rise. Magazines like Bazaar and Vogue might have been headquartered in New York, but much of their revenue was made by keeping advertisers and subscribers in every state sweet. Many editors and models spent much of their time on the road, giving talks and hosting fashion shows at regional department stores and hotels. So whilst Barbara Mullen (one of her closest friends) stayed moored in Manhattan, Pedersen worked her way around the nation, bringing the clothes readers glimpsed in magazine pages to life. And through one of those shows, in California, she met her second husband, and danced off the scene with barely a backward glance; a happy ending — even if slightly belated — after all.

<img alt="" class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="/images/5873/preview/medium" width="400">


    Joan Pedersen grew up dreaming about dancing. But fate led her to modelling instead, and to a successful career that flew largely under history’s radar. 

    World’s Oldest Living Cover Girl. It’s a title that rests lightly on the shoulders with Joan Pedersen Coleman, an elegant, chatty 93-year-old, who first graced the cover of Vogue seventy years ago — and did so in some style, appearing on three covers in as many months. In late June, sprawled across grass, she recreated Manet’s Déjeuner sur l'herbe for illustrator René Bouché; a month later, Dick Rutledge photographed her as a giggling debutante, her springy blonde curls cloaked by a lace parasol; and at the start of September, she posed in a sweeping Balenciaga coat, suddenly serious for Irving Penn. For models nowadays (unless you’re a Kardashian, or a Hadid) that level of newsstand exposure is practically unheard of. And where it does happen, it signals the arrival of a star. But Joan Pedersen’s story got lost somewhere between then and now, squeezed out of history by the glamorous goddesses who’d gone before her in the Thirties — and the sharply elegant midcentury ice-queens who followed in her wake.

    Born in New Jersey in 1924, Pedersen was the daughter of a Norwegian chauffeur, who’d immigrated to the US as a teenager, and married a Swedish girl. As a child, she fell in love with dancing, and won a scholarship to study at a Manhattan ballet school. But by her mid-teens, she had rocketed up to 5’ 8” in height, and had to leave those dreams behind; instead, she registered with Harry Conover, one of New York’s most powerful model agencies, and found steady work in the city’s showrooms. One of her most regular clients was Mainbocher — at the time considered perhaps the supreme American designer. She got her first Vogue booking wearing one of his outfits, switched to the Ford Agency, and quickly became a photographers’ favourite. As well as Rutledge and Penn, she worked with the likes of Halsmann, Leen, Horst, and Avedon, appearing in LIFE, Vogue and Bazaar. (“Oh, Dick was SUCH fun!”, she sighs, remembering sittings where the young photographer would keep her amused by singing the latest Broadway hits.) And she was taken to Paris by Serge Balkin to photograph the couture collections in 1947 — another accolade that few of her contemporaries would ever achieve.

        In parallel with her modelling career, Pedersen had continued to dance whenever she could. She appeared in the chorus of The Boys from Boise, the first-ever televised musical, and toured Europe in the last months of the war with the USO’s Copacacana Revue. But like most women of her time, Pedersen also dreamt of marriage. “What girl doesn’t?” she told a reporter in 1948. “When I see the guy I want I’ll know it — and he’ll know it too.” Not long after, Pedersen finally spotted the guy she wanted; she married him a year later, but within a few months had figured out that he wasn’t her Prince Charming after all. Pregnant, she returned to her parents in New Jersey, and settled back to work. She continued to book regular photographic assignments, but her dance background made her a natural choice for runway shows — a lucrative (and steady) alternative, in an era when the American public’s appetite for fashion was on the rise. Magazines like Bazaar and Vogue might have been headquartered in New York, but much of their revenue was made by keeping advertisers and subscribers in every state sweet. Many editors and models spent much of their time on the road, giving talks and hosting fashion shows at regional department stores and hotels. So whilst Barbara Mullen (one of her closest friends) stayed moored in Manhattan, Pedersen worked her way around the nation, bringing the clothes readers glimpsed in magazine pages to life. And through one of those shows, in California, she met her second husband, and danced off the scene with barely a backward glance; a happy ending — even if slightly belated — after all.

Joan Pedersen, 1951

Howard Hawks promised he’d make her a star. But Katherine Cassidy decided to go her own way, and chose modelling — and money — over the movies. “It’s fine while it lasts,” Marie Icide yawned. “Like many models, I hope to be either a dress designer or an actress.” It was the summer of 1945. And on a Paramount Studios soundstage, Icide — a precocious half-Irish, half-Romanian teenager — was being interviewed whilst filming The Stork Club, a Betty Hutton movie set in Manhattan’s hottest nightspot. The world-weary attitude was only part-affectation; born in Illinois, Icide’s family had moved to Los Angeles when she was still a schoolgirl. Her father worked for Fox Studios, and sent his only child to Hollywood High, where contemporaries included Jason Robards, Gloria Grahame, James Garner and Judy Garland. After graduation, and a short course at one of the city’s many modelling schools, Icide joined the thousands of hopefuls hovering on the margins of the movie industry. Stints posing for local magazines and designers alternated with glamorous (if brief) walk-ons in films like Weekend at the Waldorf, Her Highness and the Bellboy and Douglas Sirk’s A Scandal in Paris. But Icide wouldn’t stay in the background for long. Spotted by Howard Hawks, who’d orchestrated Lauren Bacall’s rise from model to movie star three years earlier, she was swiftly placed under contract, put to work with acting and voice coaches, and rebranded as Katherine Cassidy. Hawks ensured his protegé was seen in all the right places; there was a dramatic full-page portrait for Vogue by Herbert Matter, and a three-page Sharland feature in LIFE. But somewhere along the line, Cassidy went rogue. “I thought it’d be very good for me to see New York and see some plays.” she told a reporter. “The day after I got here I started modeling at $25 an hour — I loved it and decided I’d stay.” Hawks, predictably enough, was furious. “I felt terrible about it.” Cassidy later declared (not terribly convincingly, it has to be said.) But she went her own merry way, and quickly found success in Manhattan’s modelling world. Arriving on the scene at the same time as Jean Patchett, Cassidy shared that same winning blend of youth and arrogance, and built a roster of work with Frances McLaughlin, Diane Arbus, Fritz Henle, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Serge Balkin, Milton Greene, Lillian Bassman and Erwin Blumenfeld. In the years that followed, she bounced back and forth between Manhattan and Hollywood — appearing in blink-and-miss-it roles in movies like Son of Sinbad and The French Line whilst on visits to see her parents. But that was as far as her interest in the silver screen went. “My salary as a model here last week was $650.” she told one Big Apple gossip columnist in the mid-Fifties. “The week before it was $525. It’s not profitable for me to be in the movies.” It may well have been a purely financial decision; for most of her career, Cassidy was making in excess of $20,000 a year as a model. It might, also, have been discomfort at having her career, and her life, so firmly under Howard Hawks’ control. Or it might have been the fact that, as a gay woman, the glare of fame would simply have been too hard to manage. Modelling offered glamour, excitement, interest — as well comparative anonymity, and freedom to live her life on her own terms. Away from Hollywood's spotlight, Cassidy became part of the youthful in-crowd that adorned Peggy Fears’ new Fire Island resort — and back in Los Angeles, through the photographer William Claxton, she befriended a young swimwear designer named Rudi Gernreich. Gernreich brought Cassidy along to early meetings of the Mattachine Club, the pioneering gay rights organisation he established with his partner Henry Hay. But she fell away as the movement gained momentum, and gradually faded from the picture. Gernreich found a new Mod muse, in the shape of Peggy Moffitt. Hawks anointed a parade of replacement starlets, from Betty Threatt through to Joan Collins and Angie Dickinson. Katherine Cassidy, to all intents and purposes, disappeared; and Marie Icide lived on, in quiet obscurity, dying in Los Angeles in 1993.

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/MG_FA011.jpg?v=1690909735" width="376" height="500">


    Howard Hawks promised he’d make her a star. But Katherine Cassidy decided to go her own way, and chose modelling — and money — over the movies.

    “It’s fine while it lasts,” Marie Icide yawned. “Like many models, I hope to be either a dress designer or an actress.”

    It was the summer of 1945. And on a Paramount Studios soundstage, Icide — a precocious half-Irish, half-Romanian teenager — was being interviewed whilst filming The Stork Club, a Betty Hutton movie set in Manhattan’s hottest nightspot. The world-weary attitude was only part-affectation; born in Illinois, Icide’s family had moved to Los Angeles when she was still a schoolgirl. Her father worked for Fox Studios, and sent his only child to Hollywood High, where contemporaries included Jason Robards, Gloria Grahame, James Garner and Judy Garland. After graduation, and a short course at one of the city’s many modelling schools, Icide joined the thousands of hopefuls hovering on the margins of the movie industry. Stints posing for local magazines and designers alternated with glamorous (if brief) walk-ons in films like Weekend at the Waldorf, Her Highness and the Bellboy and Douglas Sirk’s A Scandal in Paris.

    But Icide wouldn’t stay in the background for long. Spotted by Howard Hawks, who’d orchestrated Lauren Bacall’s rise from model to movie star three years earlier, she was swiftly placed under contract, put to work with acting and voice coaches, and rebranded as Katherine Cassidy. Hawks ensured his protegé was seen in all the right places; there was a dramatic full-page portrait for Vogue by Herbert Matter, and a three-page Sharland feature in LIFE. But somewhere along the line, Cassidy went rogue. “I thought it’d be very good for me to see New York and see some plays.” she told a reporter. “The day after I got here I started modeling at $25 an hour — I loved it and decided I’d stay.”  

    Hawks, predictably enough, was furious. “I felt terrible about it.” Cassidy later declared (not terribly convincingly, it has to be said.) But she went her own merry way, and quickly found success in Manhattan’s modelling world. Arriving on the scene at the same time as Jean Patchett, Cassidy shared that same winning blend of youth and arrogance, and built a roster of work with Frances McLaughlin, Diane Arbus, Fritz Henle, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Serge Balkin, Milton Greene, Lillian Bassman and Erwin Blumenfeld. In the years that followed, she bounced back and forth between Manhattan and Hollywood — appearing in blink-and-miss-it roles in movies like Son of Sinbad and The French Line whilst on visits  to see her parents. But that was as far as her interest in the silver screen went. “My salary as a model here last week was $650.” she told one Big Apple gossip columnist in the mid-Fifties. “The week before it was $525. It’s not profitable for me to be in the movies.”

    It may well have been a purely financial decision; for most of her career, Cassidy was making in excess of $20,000 a year as a model. It might, also, have been discomfort at having her career, and her life, so firmly under Howard Hawks’ control. Or it might have been the fact that, as a gay woman, the glare of fame would simply have been too hard to manage. Modelling offered glamour, excitement, interest — as well comparative anonymity, and freedom to live her life on her own terms. Away from Hollywood's spotlight, Cassidy became part of the youthful in-crowd that adorned Peggy Fears’ new Fire Island resort — and back in Los Angeles, through the photographer William Claxton, she befriended a young swimwear designer named Rudi Gernreich. Gernreich brought Cassidy along to early meetings of the Mattachine Club, the pioneering gay rights organisation he established with his partner Henry Hay. But she fell away as the movement gained momentum, and gradually faded from the picture. Gernreich found a new Mod muse, in the shape of Peggy Moffitt. Hawks anointed a parade of replacement starlets, from Betty Threatt through to Joan Collins and Angie Dickinson. Katherine Cassidy, to all intents and purposes, disappeared; and Marie Icide lived on, in quiet obscurity, dying in Los Angeles in 1993.

Katherine Cassidy, 1950

From Cote d’Azur beauty pageants to animal rights protests, and from couture salons to encounters with royalty and movie stars, Liat Sandys’ modelling career was — at the very least — never boring. I’ve been living with the stories of most of the women I’ve written about for the best part of five years. But a few weeks ago, out of idle interest, I ran a Google search for ‘top fashion model 1958’. One of the first images to flash up was of someone I’d never seen before — a woman in a mirrored room, her frame twisting away from the camera towards a smiling observer. The caption shed a little more light, and provided the start of a breadcrumb trail; ‘Anglo-Indian fashion model Liat Sands models in the Mayfair salon of top couturier Ronald Paterson. Her boyfriend Ken Swift admires the squirrel fur lining of her dress and jacket.’ The phrase ‘Anglo-Indian’ (like most long-standing, straightforwardly descriptive terms) is far less straightforward than it should be. For most of its history, its usage has been split cleanly in two; applied equally to people of British descent who’d been born in India, and to people of mixed British and Indian heritage. But in the Fifties, on London’s modelling scene, it was a narrative adopted on more than one occasion by women who slipped between both definitions. Nina Dyer’s exotic looks, and stories of a childhood spent on a Ceylonese tea plantation won her countless column inches (albeit relatively minor professional success) in the run up to her two spectacular marriages; it was only after her tragic death — and a protracted court case — that Dyer was proven to have been born in London, the daughter of a couple from a very un-exotic part of Surrey. Calcutta-born Anna Kashfi, meanwhile, soared to success both on runways and on screen. But her marriage to Marlon Brando became mired in tabloid drama when her estranged parents, based in Cardiff, emerged wielding a birth certificate to prove her real name was Joan O’Callaghan. (Sixty years on, Kashfi’s claims that she’d been born to an Indian couple, and adopted soon after birth have never been definitely confirmed — or disproven.) But Liat Sandys (not Sands) was clear, right from the start. The daughter of an English man and an Indian woman, her early appearances in print came thanks to stints displaying traditional saris at London trade fairs. By 1958, she had become a successful mainstream fashion model — and her face had been splashed across newspapers round the world when she won the title ‘Bronze Venus of the Riviera’. But it would be her social life, rather than her work, that kept Sandys in the newspaper headlines — first thanks to her romance with playboy gambler Mark Sykes, and then with a Danish suitor who ultimately decided that the 15 cats she shared her apartment with were too much to handle. But if Liat Sandys is remembered today (if at all), it’s for her relationship with Marlon Brando — whom she pronounced ‘the strangest and most paradoxical human being I’ve ever met’. The two were introduced in 1959, in Paris, where Brando was recuperating from his breakup with Kashfi, and where Sandys was recovering from a car crash that had temporarily stalled her career. The first, unpromising encounter between awkward Hollywood star and baffled model ended with a surreal poetry reading in Brando’s hotel suite in the small hours of the morning. But it led to a playfully affectionate friendship, that would continue decades after Sandys’ modelling career ended. She switched to acting in the Sixties with limited success, scooping up occasional theatre roles and TV bit parts; ‘I have spent a lot of time going to auditions and being told ‘We’ll let you know’ ’, she sighed to The Stage. Simultaneously, galvanised by Ruth Harrison’s book Animal Machines, she became a vocal protester against modern farming methods. It soon took of all of her time (and savings). But Sandys proved to be a highly effective spokesperson; she managed to set up face-to-face encounters with the Minister for Agriculture, Prince Philip and even the Queen, keeping her name — and her cause — in the headlines on a regular basis. By the Seventies Sandys had become a secretary, working for a small investment banking firm in South Kensington. And in the early part of that decade, she wrote an affectionate tell-all about Brando for an American women’s magazine. But after that, her name simply disappears, with no record of what came after. ‘I wouldn’t mind becoming an old maid surrounded by cats.’ she’d told a Daily Mail interviewer, at the height of her success. Perhaps she did.

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/SandysLiat.jpg?v=1690909739" width="376" height="500">



 From Cote d’Azur beauty pageants to animal rights protests, and from couture salons to encounters with royalty and movie stars, Liat Sandys’ modelling career was — at the very least — never boring.


I’ve been living with the stories of most of the women I’ve written about for the best part of five years. But a few weeks ago, out of idle interest, I ran a Google search for ‘top fashion model 1958’. One of the first images to flash up was of someone I’d never seen before — a woman in a mirrored room, her frame twisting away from the camera towards a smiling observer. The caption shed a little more light, and provided the start of a breadcrumb trail; ‘Anglo-Indian fashion model Liat Sands models in the Mayfair salon of top couturier Ronald Paterson. Her boyfriend Ken Swift admires the squirrel fur lining of her dress and jacket.’

The phrase ‘Anglo-Indian’ (like most long-standing, straightforwardly descriptive terms) is far less straightforward than it should be. For most of its history, its usage has been split cleanly in two; applied equally to people of British descent who’d been born in India, and to people of mixed British and Indian heritage. But in the Fifties, on London’s modelling scene, it was a narrative adopted on more than one occasion by women who slipped between both definitions. Nina Dyer’s exotic looks, and stories of a childhood spent on a Ceylonese tea plantation won her countless column inches (albeit relatively minor professional success) in the run up to her two spectacular marriages; it was only after her tragic death — and a protracted court case — that Dyer was proven to have been born in London, the daughter of a couple from a very un-exotic part of Surrey. Calcutta-born Anna Kashfi, meanwhile, soared to success both on runways and on screen. But her marriage to Marlon Brando became mired in tabloid drama when her estranged parents, based in Cardiff, emerged wielding a birth certificate to prove her real name was Joan O’Callaghan. (Sixty years on, Kashfi’s claims that she’d been born to an Indian couple, and adopted soon after birth have never been definitely confirmed — or disproven.) 

But Liat Sandys (not Sands) was clear, right from the start. The daughter of an English man and an Indian woman, her early appearances in print came thanks to stints displaying traditional saris at London trade fairs. By 1958, she had become a successful mainstream fashion model — and her face had been splashed across newspapers round the world when she won the title ‘Bronze Venus of the Riviera’. But it would be her social life, rather than her work, that kept Sandys in the newspaper headlines — first thanks to her romance with playboy gambler Mark Sykes, and then with a Danish suitor who ultimately decided that the 15 cats she shared her apartment with were too much to handle. But if Liat Sandys is remembered today (if at all), it’s for her relationship with Marlon Brando — whom she pronounced ‘the strangest and most paradoxical human being I’ve ever met’. 

The two were introduced in 1959, in Paris, where Brando was recuperating from his breakup with Kashfi, and where Sandys was recovering from a car crash that had temporarily stalled her career. The first, unpromising encounter between awkward Hollywood star and baffled model ended with a surreal poetry reading in Brando’s hotel suite in the small hours of the morning. But it led to a playfully affectionate friendship, that would continue decades after Sandys’ modelling career ended. She switched to acting in the Sixties with limited success, scooping up occasional theatre roles and TV bit parts; ‘I have spent a lot of time going to auditions and being told ‘We’ll let you know’ ’, she sighed to The Stage. Simultaneously, galvanised by Ruth Harrison’s book Animal Machines, she became a vocal protester against modern farming methods. It soon took of all of her time (and savings). But Sandys proved to be a highly effective spokesperson; she managed to set up face-to-face encounters with the Minister for Agriculture, Prince Philip and even the Queen, keeping her name — and her cause — in the headlines on a regular basis. 

By the Seventies Sandys had become a secretary, working for a small investment banking firm in South Kensington. And in the early part of that decade, she wrote an affectionate tell-all about Brando for an American women’s magazine. But after that, her name simply disappears, with no record of what came after. ‘I wouldn’t mind becoming an old maid surrounded by cats.’ she’d told a Daily Mail interviewer, at the height of her success. Perhaps she did.

Liat Sandys, 1958

It's the most clichéd of clichés, but sometimes life just gets in the way. And so, for most of the last six months, thanks to an obstacle course of different events - work, family, health, Brexit - The Replacement Girl has been on hold. But we're back. And having hit the 85% mark during the hiatus, it's beginning to feel like we're on the home stretch - wrapping up interviews, agreeing image rights, and raising the outstanding funds to make the project a reality. Plus, in parallel, director John Sanvidge has begun working on a documentary about Barbara Mullen's life and career. So last month, over the course of two brilliantly sunny, blisteringly cold days, we returned to Manhattan to shoot a series of interviews for the project. For the most part, we filmed in midtown, among the avenues and cross streets where Barbara's career began - and returning to Bergdorf Goodman, where she landed her first modelling job in 1945. Lots has changed at 754 Fifth Avenue since those days.The store looks very different now, both inside and out. But on the fourth floor, where Barbara once paraded though the store’s couture salons, it’s still a world of soft light and sparkling gowns and wealthy women. And finally, some eighty years after Barbara Mullen left 125th Street behind, we went back to film in her childhood neighbourhood. Harlem is a landscape now colonised by Starbucks and McDonalds (and a reincarnated Cotton Club), but in most other respects it’s still much as it was during the Depression; the brick apartment blocks and narrow courtyards, the green ridge of Riverside Park, the rumble of the elevated rail line. It was a happy, moving, funny morning. And it seemed fitting, nearing the end of this six-year-long process, to go back to the very start.

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/IMG_4478.jpg?v=1690909743" width="400" height="500">



 It's the most clichéd of clichés, but sometimes life just gets in the way. And so, for most of the last six months, thanks to an obstacle course of different events - work, family, health, Brexit - The Replacement Girl has been on hold. 


But we're back. And having hit the 85% mark during the hiatus, it's beginning to feel like we're on the home stretch - wrapping up interviews, agreeing image rights, and raising the outstanding funds to make the project a reality. 

Plus, in parallel, director John Sanvidge has begun working on a documentary about Barbara Mullen's life and career. So last month, over the course of two brilliantly sunny, blisteringly cold days, we returned to Manhattan to shoot a series of interviews for the project. For the most part, we filmed in midtown, among the avenues and cross streets where Barbara's career began - and returning to Bergdorf Goodman, where she landed her first modelling job in 1945. Lots has changed at 754 Fifth Avenue since those days.The store looks very different now, both inside and out. But on the fourth floor, where Barbara once paraded though the store’s couture salons, it’s still a world of soft light and sparkling gowns and wealthy women. 

And finally, some eighty years after Barbara Mullen left 125th Street behind, we went back to film in her childhood neighbourhood. Harlem is a landscape now colonised by Starbucks and McDonalds (and a reincarnated Cotton Club), but in most other respects it’s still much as it was during the Depression; the brick apartment blocks and narrow courtyards, the green ridge of Riverside Park, the rumble of the elevated rail line. It was a happy, moving, funny morning. And it seemed fitting, nearing the end of this six-year-long process, to go back to the very start.

Lights, Camera, Action

For some, modelling was an end in itself. But for Liz Benn, it was a springboard — one that catapulted her from a humble Canadian upbringing to life at the helm of the Caribbean’s most glamorous resort. It’s hard to imagine Liz Benn ever having an awkward age. From the very start, her pictures radiated a commanding presence; skin glowing, stance confident, profile always perfectly tilted into the light. Even in out-of-the-way Toronto, aged just 13, she caught the eye of casting agents searching for a girl to play the lead in MGM’s National Velvet; Benn made the shortlist, but was deemed too tall for the role (she lost out to the more experienced — and suitably shorter — Elizabeth Taylor.) It would be one of the few times in Liz Benn’s long life where her height would prove a problem. By the time Hollywood came calling, she’d already built up a successful modelling career in her hometown, working part-time out of school hours to help support her struggling family. Focused and ambitious, by the age of 18 she’d saved enough to buy her parents a house, and a car — and herself a one-way plane ticket to New York. She arrived there in the spring of 1948, was signed by Eileen and Jerry Ford’s fledgling agency, and got booked by Richard Avedon for her very first assignment. Within two years, Benn had appeared on four Bazaar covers, and had racked up advertising and editorial credits for the likes of Lillian Bassman, Roger Prigent and John Rawlings. That winter, Benn flew to Jamaica with Mary Jane Russell and photographer Toni Frissell. Landing at Kingston, they found an eager young local hotelier, John Pringle, on standby to welcome the glamorous American arrivals. As Russell — his first choice — was already married, Pringle turned his attention to Benn; they fell in love, got engaged and then married in a matter of weeks. For the next few years, the couple made their home in New York, where Pringle opened a successful menswear store whilst his wife continued to model. But Jamaica, in the end, proved too much of a lure. In 1953, the Pringles returned there, transforming an old plantation near Montego Bay into the island’s most exclusive destination. Noël Coward was the first to buy one of Round Hill’s bungalows, and the cream of the international jet set quickly followed suit; the Astaires, Paleys, Kennedys, Gables, Bernsteins and Snowdons all became regulars at the destination whose welcome mats proudly proclaimed ‘Go Away’. And whilst John Pringle was the resort’s ebullient front man, his glamorous, formidable wife played an equally key (if quieter) role. “When I first met Liz Pringle,” banker Henry Tiarks remembered, “I felt like a Boy Scout being inspected by Queen Mary.” That’s where, by rights, Benn’s modelling career should have ended — as the ornamental fulcrum of a sun-kissed social whirl. But instead, against the odds, it went from strength to strength. She rarely travelled back to Manhattan, but the photographers that had booked her so regularly there came to her instead. Avedon, a lifelong friend, visited regularly with his family, and photographed her for Bazaar and LIFE. She did editorial shoots on Round Hill’s spectacular beaches, with Norman Parkinson, Slim Aarons, Louise Dahl-Wolfe and John Rawlings — who famously shot her for a Vogue cover in a strapless Givenchy swimsuit, her suntanned skin glowing against a cobalt blue sea. It’s perhaps the most famous picture ever taken of Benn, and it sums up her unique appeal. Vital and charismatic where her contemporaries were anonymously ethereal, she dominates the frame —even with her body folded behind her, and her eyes closed. Thefairytale, like all real-life fairytales, came to an end. In the early Sixties, overworked and overtired, the Pringles sold Round Hill and moved to Switzerland. They returned to Jamaica to help build the island’s profile as a tourist destination in the Sixties, before decamping to London where Pringle took up a role running Doyle Dane Bernbach’s British office. The couple divorced in the Seventies, but remained close for the rest of their lives. And Benn returned to her beloved Jamaica — where, right to the end of her life, she commanded attention wherever she went.

Liz Benn, 1953

If any of Manhattan’s first generation of models could have successfully told (and sold) their story, it would have been Liz Gibbons. She did, in fact, over thirty years ago — a fascinating historical document of a fashion industry just beginning to take shape. But the manuscript was rejected by her publishing house, and has lain untouched ever since. Like many models, Liz Gibbons name is known today largely because a famous photographer plucked her name from the shadows. In Gibbons’ case, it was Louise Dahl-Wolfe, who mentioned her in a 1984 interview with the New York Times (coinciding with Dahl-Wolfe’s own overdue rediscovery): “The first model that ever inspired me was Liz Gibbons,” she reminisced, “this long, long girl whose skin was almost gold.” But if Louise Dahl-Wolfe made Liz Gibbons’ reputation, then Gibbons also arguably made Dahl-Wolfe’s. Rejected by Vogue for being too old, and struggling to find a foothold in the city’s nascent freelance scene, Dahl-Wolfe languished in the background at Bazaar until Gibbons walked into her studio in 1936. By then, Gibbons had been struggling too; born in Alabama, she’d moved to Manhattan to pursue a career in design, but found a city leached of opportunities by the hardships of the Depression. After short stints as a sales-girl, an advertising assistant and a photography studio PR, a twist of fate saw her coaxed into taking part in a catalogue fashion shoot. But her pronounced, powerful features and stiff movements put off most of the photographers she tested with. She’d been on the verge of giving up — until Edward Steichen, rejecting her with touching, gentlemanly kindness, recommended she seek out Louise Dahl-Wolfe. The two clicked instantly, producing pictures which captivated Carmel Snow, and which catapulted them both to front-page status. Though many of the most enduringly famous are in luminous monochrome, the two women produced sumptuous colour shoots that showcased Gibbons' sophisticatedly bored attitude (and the rich skin tone whch had first seduced Dahl-Wolfe) in a variety of exotic locations. Together, they were allegedly responsible for the first-ever published fashion photo in which a model was laughing; they were certainly responsible for the first published nude shot in a fashion magazine. And the success brought Gibbons to the attention of other photographers like George Platt Lynes and Irving Penn (who immortalised her for Vogue in 1947, alongside 11 of her contemporaries, in his iconic 'Twelve Beauties: The Most Photographed Models in America.') It was Liz Gibbons' final sitting. She had already begun a successful career off-camera, becoming a fashion editor both at Bazaar and Glamour, before marrying and moving to California (where she took up a position as Vogue's West Coast correspondent, and became a champion of Los Angeles' midcentury art scene). Her memoir is an extraordinary document, both in its capturing of the early fashion hubs in Paris and New York, and its depiction of the realities of a model’s life. Honest, funny and self-deprecating, it offers a surprisingly contemporary view on experiences which veer from the poignant to the harrowing to the absurd — experiences with which all too many 21st century models might be able to empathise.

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/2515.jpg?v=1690909750" width="400">


    If any of Manhattan’s first generation of models could have successfully told (and sold) their story, it would have been Liz Gibbons. She did, in fact, over thirty years ago — a fascinating historical document of a fashion industry just beginning to take shape. But the manuscript was rejected by her publishing house, and has lain untouched ever since.

        Like many models, Liz Gibbons name is known today largely because a famous photographer plucked her name from the shadows. In Gibbons’ case, it was Louise Dahl-Wolfe, who mentioned her in a 1984 interview with the New York Times (coinciding with Dahl-Wolfe’s own overdue rediscovery): “The first model that ever inspired me was Liz Gibbons,” she reminisced, “this long, long girl whose skin was almost gold.”

    But if Louise Dahl-Wolfe made Liz Gibbons’ reputation, then Gibbons also arguably made Dahl-Wolfe’s. Rejected by Vogue for being too old, and struggling to find a foothold in the city’s nascent freelance scene, Dahl-Wolfe languished in the background at Bazaar until Gibbons walked into her studio in 1936. By then, Gibbons had been struggling too; born in Alabama, she’d moved to Manhattan to pursue a career in design, but found a city leached of opportunities by the hardships of the Depression. After short stints as a sales-girl, an advertising assistant and a photography studio PR, a twist of fate saw her coaxed into taking part in a catalogue fashion shoot. But her pronounced, powerful features and stiff movements put off most of the photographers she tested with. She’d been on the verge of giving up — until Edward Steichen, rejecting her with touching, gentlemanly kindness, recommended she seek out Louise Dahl-Wolfe.  

    The two clicked instantly, producing pictures which captivated Carmel Snow, and which catapulted them both to front-page status. Though many of the most enduringly famous are in luminous monochrome, the two women produced sumptuous colour shoots that showcased Gibbons' sophisticatedly bored attitude (and the rich skin tone whch had first seduced Dahl-Wolfe) in a variety of exotic locations. Together, they were allegedly responsible for the first-ever published fashion photo in which a model was laughing; they were certainly responsible for the first published nude shot in a fashion magazine. And the success brought Gibbons to the attention of other photographers like George Platt Lynes and Irving Penn (who immortalised her for Vogue in 1947, alongside 11 of her contemporaries, in his iconic 'Twelve Beauties: The Most Photographed Models in America.')

    It was Liz Gibbons' final sitting. She had already begun a successful career off-camera, becoming a fashion editor both at Bazaar and Glamour, before marrying and moving to California (where she took up a position as Vogue's West Coast correspondent, and became a champion of Los Angeles' midcentury art scene). Her memoir is an extraordinary document, both in its capturing of the early fashion hubs in Paris and New York, and its depiction of the realities of a model’s life. Honest, funny and self-deprecating, it offers a surprisingly contemporary view on experiences which veer from the poignant to the harrowing to the absurd — experiences with which all too many 21st century models might be able to empathise.
<script src="https://cdn.inspectlet.com/inspectifr/1497926764.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Liz Gibbons, 1938

It’s been just over eight months since Harper’s Bazaar published a book to celebrate their 150th anniversary. For its cover, out of all the iconic images produced across the magazine’s long history, they chose a spectacular Lillian Bassman portrait of Barbara Mullen in Dior; Barbara’s first Bazaar cover, as it happened, in almost sixty-five years. And that same month, at a star-studded party thrown to celebrate the book’s launch, they projected the same image onto the Empire State Building — an unexpected birthday present for a girl born on this island ninety years ago. I first met Barbara Mullen in 2013. And we’ve spent much of the four years since then talking to editors, agents and publishers across Europe and America about the idea of publishing her biography. Each time, without fail, we were told how much they loved the story; and each time, equally without fail, they regretfully explained they couldn’t publish it. We began 2017, in all honesty, on the verge of giving up. But when we saw the Bazaar image, projected onto the most iconic building in the world, it felt like more than just a crowning moment in Barbara’s unique career; it seemed like a sign. Ever since, we’ve been working with crowdfunding publishers Unbound to make Barbara’s biography happen. The story has been featured everywhere from Elle Brasil to El Pais, to Another Magazine here in the UK. We’ve been championed by a host of photographers, brands and archives, and lectured at museums, literary events and bookshops. We’ve travelled to Paris, Zurich and Rome to follow in her footsteps. And this past week, in a very snowy New York, I’ve been able to finally walk the streets where Barbara Mullen grew up, to explore the studios and stores where she forged her career, and delve into the archives of the photographers who took some of her greatest pictures. But most of all, thanks to your help, we’re a quarter of the way towards achieving our final target. In 2018, there’s plenty of book-related action coming up, from literary festivals to podcasts to exhibitions. Until then, have a peaceful Christmas, and a wonderful New Year. And a very sincere thank you, from Unbound, Barbara and I, for all your support.

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/hbz-bazaar-150-esb-projections-17.jpg?v=1690909754" width="333" height="500">


It’s been just over eight months since Harper’s Bazaar published a book to celebrate their 150th anniversary. For its cover, out of all the iconic images produced across the magazine’s long history, they chose a spectacular Lillian Bassman portrait of Barbara Mullen in Dior; Barbara’s first Bazaar cover, as it happened, in almost sixty-five years. And that same month, at a star-studded party thrown to celebrate the book’s launch, they projected the same image onto the Empire State Building — an unexpected birthday present for a girl born on this island ninety years ago.

I first met Barbara Mullen in 2013. And we’ve spent much of the four years since then talking to editors, agents and publishers across Europe and America about the idea of publishing her biography. Each time, without fail, we were told how much they loved the story; and each time, equally without fail, they regretfully explained they couldn’t publish it. We began 2017, in all honesty, on the verge of giving up. But when we saw the Bazaar image, projected onto the most iconic building in the world, it felt like more than just a crowning moment in Barbara’s unique career; it seemed like a sign.

Ever since, we’ve been working with crowdfunding publishers Unbound to make Barbara’s biography happen. The story has been featured everywhere from Elle Brasil to El Pais, to Another Magazine here in the UK. We’ve been championed by a host of photographers, brands and archives, and lectured at museums, literary events and bookshops. We’ve travelled to Paris, Zurich and Rome to follow in her footsteps. And this past week, in a very snowy New York, I’ve been able to finally walk the streets where Barbara Mullen grew up, to explore the studios and stores where she forged her career, and delve into the archives of the photographers who took some of her greatest pictures.

But most of all, thanks to your help, we’re a quarter of the way towards achieving our final target. In 2018, there’s plenty of book-related action coming up, from literary festivals to podcasts to exhibitions. Until then, have a peaceful Christmas, and a wonderful New Year. And a very sincere thank you, from Unbound, Barbara and I, for all your support. 


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/BM_1.png?v=1690909754" width="500" height="317">

Manhattan, Christmas 2017

Many of the top models of the Forties and Fifties enjoyed exceptionally long careers. But even by those standards, Marilyn Ambrose was exceptional, enjoying two decades of top-flight success — forging a now-faded reputation as one of the most elegant women in fashion. In 1947, Irving Penn’s now-iconic portrait of the most photographed models in America was first published. Shot against a sparse studio backdrop, the picture documented a group of poised, mature women in their thirties and forties. The only exception was a 24-year-old called Marilyn Ambrose, drafted in (alongside Dorian Leigh) as a last-minute substitute. A year later, Ambrose appeared in another famous group image, this time waring Charles James gowns for Cecil Beaton. Three years later, she’s hovering in the margins of a Mark Shaw image of the Ford Agency’s top models, sandwiched between Lucille Lewis and Jean Patchett. Fast forward to the end of the Fifties, and there she is again; this one taken by Richard Avedon and printed in McCall’s, under the headline ‘A MILLION DOLLARS WORTH OF MODELS!’, Born in Oklahoma, Ambrose grew up in New Jersey, and studied at the prestigious Duke University. But in her sophomore year she won an ‘Unknown Beauty’ magazine contest, and by the time she graduated had the first of her Vogue covers already under her belt. Unlike most of her contemporaries, though, Ambrose’s career never entirely took off; and yet, likewise, she never completely faded from view. In the Forties, she’s shooting static, statuesque images for Horst; in the early Fifties, her hair cropped, she’s a regular subject for up-and-comers like Francesco Scavullo. And on, and on, and on; colourful ad campaigns for Dick Avedon, striking editorials for Genevieve Naylor, Lillian Bassman and Clifford Coffin, and magazine covers for Constantin Joffé. And as her career evolved, so did her life off-camera. Married at 25 to an eminently suitable young doctor (and photographed for Vogue by John Rawlings as the perfect model bride), she burst back into the gossip columns mid-fifties thanks to flings with photographer Phil Stearns and millionaire Amaury de Riencourt. She went on to have a brief, difficult second marriage to avant-garde film-maker Emile D’Antonio (with whom she shared a mirrored Manhattan apartment) — before marrying again, in the mid-Sixties, to a Harvard psychiatry professor, and evaporating without trace. Ambrose never entirely seemed of the moment; old-fashioned by the time Mullen and her contemporaries surfaced with their reed-thin bodies and graphic faces, and an industry veteran by the time Jean Shrimpton exploded onto the scene. But those long years of experience made her an astute observer of her own profession; profiled by the New York Times in 1961, as she was making the shift behind the camera to life as a photographer’s representative, she reflected; ‘You’re spoiled when you model. People pamper you. Photographers and editors flatter you. You wear prettier clothes and travel to places you could never afford otherwise. And you begin to think you deserve it.’

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/marilyn-ambrose-three-views-lend-a-slight-surrealist-quality-to-image-cubist-design-vogue-january-1944-c2a9-john-rawlings-copia.jpg?v=1690909757" width="400">


    Many of the top models of the Forties and Fifties enjoyed exceptionally long careers. But even by those standards, Marilyn Ambrose was exceptional, enjoying two decades of top-flight success — forging a now-faded reputation as one of the most elegant women in fashion.

    In 1947, Irving Penn’s now-iconic portrait of the most photographed models in America was first published. Shot against a sparse studio backdrop, the picture documented a group of poised, mature women in their thirties and forties. The only exception was a 24-year-old called Marilyn Ambrose, drafted in (alongside Dorian Leigh) as a last-minute substitute. A year later, Ambrose appeared in another famous group image, this time waring Charles James gowns for Cecil Beaton. Three years later, she’s hovering in the margins of a Mark Shaw image of the Ford Agency’s top models, sandwiched between Lucille Lewis and Jean Patchett. Fast forward to the end of the Fifties, and there she is again; this one taken by Richard Avedon and printed in McCall’s, under the headline ‘A MILLION DOLLARS WORTH OF MODELS!’,

    Born in Oklahoma, Ambrose grew up in New Jersey, and studied at the prestigious Duke University. But in her sophomore year she won an ‘Unknown Beauty’ magazine contest, and by the time she graduated had the first of her Vogue covers already under her belt. Unlike most of her contemporaries, though, Ambrose’s career never entirely took off; and yet, likewise, she never completely faded from view. In the Forties, she’s shooting static, statuesque images for Horst; in the early Fifties, her hair cropped, she’s a regular subject for up-and-comers like Francesco Scavullo. And on, and on, and on; colourful ad campaigns for Dick Avedon, striking editorials for Genevieve Naylor, Lillian Bassman and Clifford Coffin, and magazine covers for Constantin Joffé.

    And as her career evolved, so did her life off-camera. Married at 25 to an eminently suitable young doctor (and photographed for Vogue by John Rawlings as the perfect model bride), she burst back into the gossip columns mid-fifties thanks to flings with photographer Phil Stearns and millionaire Amaury de Riencourt. She went on to have a brief, difficult second marriage to avant-garde film-maker Emile D’Antonio (with whom she shared a mirrored Manhattan apartment) — before marrying again, in the mid-Sixties, to a Harvard psychiatry professor, and evaporating without trace. Ambrose never entirely seemed of the moment; old-fashioned by the time Mullen and her contemporaries surfaced with their reed-thin bodies and graphic faces, and an industry veteran by the time Jean Shrimpton exploded onto the scene. But those long years of experience made her an astute observer of her own profession; profiled by the New York Times in 1961, as she was making the shift behind the camera to life as a photographer’s representative, she reflected; ‘You’re spoiled when you model. People pamper you. Photographers and editors flatter you. You wear prettier clothes and travel to places you could never afford otherwise. And you begin to think you deserve it.’

Marilyn Ambrose, 1944

Barbara Mullen’s story is unique. But it’s just one of hundreds of stories that could have been written about the modelling industry’s early pioneers. While Unbound’s campaign to publish Mullen’s biography continues, we wanted to tell the story of some of these other forgotten figures. When Mullen was born in June 1927, the cover of Vogue featured a slim figure on board a rowing boat. Her body is boyish, flattened in a sweater and skirt, with one slender arm stretched out towards the sea. The image was created, as all Vogue covers of that era were, by an artist rather than a photographer — in this case, French illustrator Georges Lepape. On that month’s newsstands, it sat next to Harper’s Bazaar (drawn by Erté, with an abstracted woman’s head in the bottom corner, whilst another head floated off towards the masthead like a balloon) and Vanity Fair (a Marian Wildman sketch, of two women on a swing slung between palm trees, outlined against the setting sun). The Twenties was the start of the fashion magazine industry’s golden age — an age that was still predominantly an illustrated one. But behind the evocative, romantic covers, things were starting to rapidly change. Intricate borders and elaborate fashion drawings were being swept away by a new generation of art directors and editors, eager to champion the still-new discipline of photography as a way of communicating modern fashion to a modern audience. It’s easy to understand why; a photographic image could show the visceral reality of clothes, in all their alluring, intricate detail, in a way that a drawing could only ever delicately suggest. But what nobody counted on was the fact that the camera’s gaze would end up deflecting away from the clothes, onto the compelling presences of the women who inhabited them. There are plenty of candidates for the crown of ‘first fashion model’; Dolores, Dorothy Stuart, Lee Miller. But Marion Morehouse, a lanky, dark-haired American actress, is unquestionably the most intriguing. She enters fashion history in 1924, when she entered a Vogue talent search to find mannequins for French couturier Jean Patou. She didn’t win — but Morehouse was noticed by the magazine’s editors, and was soon put face to face with Edward Steichen, one of its first photographic stars. In the years that followed the two collaborated regularly, to spectacular effect. His portraits of her — tall, glowing-skinned, elegantly sleek in glittering Twenties flapper gowns by Chanel and Cheruit (“Marion had no corners,” the playwright Sophie Treadwell once remarked) — have endured long beyond their predestined moment. Jessica Daves, Vogue’s editor through most of the fifties, compared Barbara Mullen’s own dark, imprecise, mercurial beauty to Morehouse’s. And towards the end of his life, Steichen was still hailing her as ‘the greatest fashion model I ever shot’. So, hardly a forgotten woman But Marion Morehouse is known, where she is known at all, because of and through Steichen pictures. Beyond that, all we know — and are told over and over again — is that she was a model, who famously married the poet e.e. cummings, and lived with him to the end of his life. She died in Greenwich seven years later. Her body was cremated, and her possessions dispersed. The rest is a blur of half-told stories; of a woman born somewhere in Indiana when the twentieth century was still hopeful and new, who had some vague theatrical success in her youth, who may (or may not) have made fleeting appearances in silent movies, and who seems to have had some quietly-nurtured ambitions towards being a photographer herself. She was unstintingly unhelpful when biographers came to call, waving their spotlights away from her life. Marion Morehouse chose not to share her story, and shape a narrative for herself. And why should she have to? But the result, inevitably and perhaps irrevocably, is that she endures only in the images and words of others. In 1953, twenty years after they’d married, and almost thirty years after she’d become a professional model, cummings looked up one day to see his now-fiftyish wife returning to their apartment ‘young lovely & gifted with beauty — as a deer in a glade, unconscious of anyone else, is beautiful.’

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/the-photographers-favorite-model-marion-moorehouse-in-a-cheruit-gown-new-york-1927-edward-steichen.jpg?v=1690909761" width="400">



     Barbara Mullen’s story is unique. But it’s just one of hundreds of stories that could have been written about the modelling industry’s early pioneers. While Unbound’s campaign to publish Mullen’s biography continues, we wanted to tell the story of some of these other forgotten figures.


    When Mullen was born in June 1927, the cover of Vogue featured a slim figure on board a rowing boat. Her body is boyish, flattened in a sweater and skirt, with one slender arm stretched out towards the sea. The image was created, as all Vogue covers of that era were, by an artist rather than a photographer — in this case, French illustrator Georges Lepape. On that month’s newsstands, it sat next to Harper’s Bazaar (drawn by Erté, with an abstracted woman’s head in the bottom corner, whilst another head floated off towards the masthead like a balloon) and Vanity Fair (a Marian Wildman sketch, of two women on a swing slung between palm trees, outlined against the setting sun).

    The Twenties was the start of the fashion magazine industry’s golden age — an age that was still predominantly an illustrated one. But behind the evocative, romantic covers, things were starting to rapidly change. Intricate borders and elaborate fashion drawings were being swept away by a new generation of art directors and editors, eager to champion the still-new discipline of photography as a way of communicating modern fashion to a modern audience. 

    It’s easy to understand why; a photographic image could show the visceral reality of clothes, in all their alluring, intricate detail, in a way that a drawing could only ever delicately suggest. But what nobody counted on was the fact that the camera’s gaze would end up deflecting away from the clothes, onto the compelling presences of the women who inhabited them.

    There are plenty of candidates for the crown of ‘first fashion model’; Dolores, Dorothy Stuart, Lee Miller. But Marion Morehouse, a lanky, dark-haired American actress, is unquestionably the most intriguing. She enters fashion history in 1924, when she entered a Vogue talent search to find mannequins for French couturier Jean Patou. She didn’t win — but Morehouse was noticed by the magazine’s editors, and was soon put face to face with Edward Steichen, one of its first photographic stars. In the years that followed the two collaborated regularly, to spectacular effect. His portraits of her — tall, glowing-skinned, elegantly sleek in glittering Twenties flapper gowns by Chanel and Cheruit (“Marion had no corners,” the playwright Sophie Treadwell once remarked) — have endured long beyond their predestined moment. Jessica Daves, Vogue’s editor through most of the fifties, compared Barbara Mullen’s own dark, imprecise, mercurial beauty to Morehouse’s. And towards the end of his life, Steichen was still hailing her as ‘the greatest fashion model I ever shot’. 

    So, hardly a forgotten woman But Marion Morehouse is known, where she is known at all, because of and through Steichen pictures. Beyond that, all we know — and are told over and over again — is that she was a model, who famously married the poet e.e. cummings, and lived with him to the end of his life. She died in Greenwich seven years later. Her body was cremated, and her possessions dispersed. The rest is a blur of half-told stories; of a woman born somewhere in Indiana when the twentieth century was still hopeful and new, who had some vague theatrical success in her youth, who may (or may not) have made fleeting appearances in silent movies, and who seems to have had some quietly-nurtured ambitions towards being a photographer herself. She was unstintingly unhelpful when biographers came to call, waving their spotlights away from her life.

    Marion Morehouse chose not to share her story, and shape a narrative for herself. And why should she have to? But the result, inevitably and perhaps irrevocably, is that she endures only in the images and words of others. In 1953, twenty years after they’d married, and almost thirty years after she’d become a professional model, cummings looked up one day to see his now-fiftyish wife returning to their apartment ‘young lovely &amp; gifted with beauty — as a deer in a glade, unconscious of anyone else, is beautiful.’
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Marion Morehouse, 1927

To borrow an expression that wouldn't become common currency till decades later, Muriel Maxwell had it all; beauty, brains, connections, and a glamorous life both in front of and behind the camera. She achieved remarkable success across much of her career — but if she’s remembered at all, it’s as one of the first of modelling’s cautionary tales. Rabbi Benjamin Tintner — the first Jewish chaplain to serve at West Point — expected a lot from his two Barnard-educated daughters. But where Adeline would become one of the century’s pre-eminent Henry James experts, Muriel plumped for the adrenaline rush of the fashion industry. She worked for milliners in London and Detroit, before being discovered in 1937 by photographer Toni Frissell. ‘Poor, star-crossed Muriel,' was how Liz Gibbons would remember her, ‘The looker of us all, whose rabbi father forbade her the use of the family name. Modelling was that trashy, he said.’ As Muriel Maxwell, she modelled full-time for barely four years ('Then I thought I'd be sick if I did it once more,' she confessed to the New York Times), before migrating to a successful career as Vogue's sittings editor; most famously, in 1947, she gathered 11 of her old contemporaries back in front of the camera for Penn's Twelve Beauties spread. Later, she joined up with Jane Gray of Harper’s Bazaar to form one of Manhattan's first fashion PR agencies. Clients included Arnold Scaasi, who thought Maxwell had 'more style in her little finger than anyone around.' And for decades, that was her standard narrative; the aloof, exotic Thirties cover girl who became a Manhattan fashion power player. But at some point in the Seventies, Maxwell disappeared from sight. Grace Mirabella heard she’d become an alcoholic; ‘Muriel Maxwell, my God, was on welfare before she died.' designer Bill Blass confided to Michael Gross. (But the Italian-American Mirabella, an outsider like Maxwell amongst Condé Nast’s impeccably-pedigreed socialites, was sceptical; 'I think it could be legend,’ she reflected, ’the colorful talk of old Vogue editors who still, to this day and in their retirement, have trouble thinking of [Maxwell] as one of them.’) That sense of otherness is borne out in many of Maxwell’s pictures — most notably in Horst’s 1941 double-shot, where he contrasts her face (the flat planes, the short nose, the freckled cheeks, the waves of bronze hair, the long slanted eyes) with that of serenely blonde all-American Georgia Carroll. ‘I broke all the rules of beauty.’ Maxwell declared in 1961; it seems a shame, fifty years on, that she’s had so little credit for it.

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/65684d1bcf26cf1460ce4e73df3bd5ea.jpg?v=1690909765" width="400"> 



 To borrow an expression that wouldn't become common currency till decades later, Muriel Maxwell had it all; beauty, brains, connections, and a glamorous life both in front of and behind the camera. She achieved remarkable success across much of her career — but if she’s remembered at all, it’s as one of the first of modelling’s cautionary tales.


 

    Rabbi Benjamin Tintner — the first Jewish chaplain to serve at West Point — expected a lot from his two Barnard-educated daughters. But where Adeline would become one of the century’s pre-eminent Henry James experts, Muriel plumped for the adrenaline rush of the fashion industry. She worked for milliners in London and Detroit, before being discovered in 1937 by photographer Toni Frissell. ‘Poor, star-crossed Muriel,' was how Liz Gibbons would remember her, ‘The looker of us all, whose rabbi father forbade her the use of the family name. Modelling was that trashy, he said.’

    As Muriel Maxwell, she modelled full-time for barely four years ('Then I thought I'd be sick if I did it once more,' she confessed to the New York Times), before migrating to a successful career as Vogue's sittings editor; most famously, in 1947, she gathered 11 of her old contemporaries back in front of the camera for Penn's Twelve Beauties spread. Later, she joined up with Jane Gray of Harper’s Bazaar to form one of Manhattan's first fashion PR agencies. Clients included Arnold Scaasi, who thought Maxwell had 'more style in her little finger than anyone around.' And for decades, that was her standard narrative; the aloof, exotic Thirties cover girl who became a Manhattan fashion power player. 

    But at some point in the Seventies, Maxwell disappeared from sight. Grace Mirabella heard she’d become an alcoholic; ‘Muriel Maxwell, my God, was on welfare before she died.' designer Bill Blass confided to Michael Gross. (But the Italian-American Mirabella, an outsider like Maxwell amongst Condé Nast’s impeccably-pedigreed socialites, was sceptical; 'I think it could be legend,’ she reflected, ’the colorful talk of old Vogue editors who still, to this day and in their retirement, have trouble thinking of [Maxwell] as one of them.’) 

    That sense of otherness is borne out in many of Maxwell’s pictures — most notably in Horst’s 1941 double-shot, where he contrasts her face (the flat planes, the short nose, the freckled cheeks, the waves of bronze hair, the long slanted eyes) with that of serenely blonde all-American Georgia Carroll. ‘I broke all the rules of beauty.’ Maxwell declared in 1961; it seems a shame, fifty years on, that she’s had so little credit for it.

 
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Muriel Maxwell, 1941

It's been a while. Seven years, six months and eighteen days to be precise, since I first met Barbara Mullen. And nine years, two months and twelve days (give or take), since I first saw Lillian Bassman's portrait of her, photographed at La Grand Véfour in Paris in 1949; an impossibly long streak of arm and neck, slicing across the frame - and a face twisted away from the camera's glare, disappearing into the shadows. I've spent the last few days looking back on the journey that picture triggered. Countless days spent in archives, libraries, estates and archives in Austin, Berlin, London, Long Island, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rochester, Washington, Yale and Zurich, assisted by some of the most patient people imaginable. 12,788 screenshots from Google searches. 4,269 downloads from online resources. 450 scans from Barbara's own archive. 95 interviews. Page-by-page scouring of 73 different magazine titles (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swiss), ranging from a single issue to fifteen-year runs. 263 non-fiction books, 95 biographies, 64 novels, 32 screenplays, 8 plays. And 1 endlessly surprising subject, less than six months away from her 94th birthday - but still, she would like everyone to know, sticking at 85. The book, in structure and outline, is exactly the same as it was when I first pitched it to publishers in the summer of 2013; 24 individual essays, each one exploring a different moment of Barbara Mullen's long career. Some chapters were only written in the latest lockdown; one or two are older than most of my nieces and nephews. But now they're all condensed down into a single file - 84,000 words, in double-spaced 12-point Times New Roman - that measures only 750kb. It seems, after all that, ridiculously small. All that's left is to hit send, and watch it go out into the world - or at least to an unfortunate editor, who's about to get swamped in the world of midcentury fashion modelling from 1945-1962. And to wish you all a better, brighter 2021.

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It's been a while. 

Seven years, six months and eighteen days to be precise, since I first met Barbara Mullen. And nine years, two months and twelve days (give or take), since I first saw Lillian Bassman's portrait of her, photographed at La Grand Véfour in Paris in 1949; an impossibly long streak of arm and neck, slicing across the frame - and a face twisted away from the camera's glare, disappearing into the shadows.

I've spent the last few days looking back on the journey that picture triggered. Countless days spent in archives, libraries, estates and archives in Austin, Berlin, London, Long Island, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rochester, Washington, Yale and Zurich, assisted by some of the most patient people imaginable. 

12,788 screenshots from Google searches. 4,269 downloads from online resources. 450 scans from Barbara's own archive. 95 interviews. Page-by-page scouring of 73 different magazine titles (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swiss), ranging from a single issue to fifteen-year runs. 263 non-fiction books, 95 biographies, 64 novels, 32 screenplays, 8 plays. And 1 endlessly surprising subject, less than six months away from her 94th birthday - but still, she would like everyone to know, sticking at 85.

The book, in structure and outline, is exactly the same as it was when I first pitched it to publishers in the summer of 2013; 24 individual essays, each one exploring a different moment of Barbara Mullen's long career. Some chapters were only written in the latest lockdown; one or two are older than most of my nieces and nephews. But now they're all condensed down into a single file - 84,000 words, in double-spaced 12-point Times New Roman - that measures only 750kb. It seems, after all that, ridiculously small.

All that's left is to hit send, and watch it go out into the world - or at least to an unfortunate editor, who's about to get swamped in the world of midcentury fashion modelling from 1945-1962.

And to wish you all a better, brighter 2021.

New Year's Eve

Or to be more precise, 'Ninety-FOUUUURRR'???? That's what Barbara Mullen shrieked when I called the other day. 'My birthday? Oh God, I forgot all about it. NINETY-FOUR. That's DIS-GUST-ING. That means I'm going to be a HUNDRED soon.' (Which is why she's staying put at 85, as she has for the past nine years.) Ninety-four years since June 3rd, 1927. Barbara was barely a week old when Charles Lindbergh landed back in America to ticker-tape parades, a hero thanks to his transatlantic crossing; a year old when Mickey Mouse made his big-screen debut; two when the New York Stock Exchange collapsed, and five when they started building the Golden Gate Bridge. She made her first communion the year Jesse Owens swept the boards at the Berlin Olympics, and entered junior high just as World War Two ignited. She'd only just begun her first modelling job when a radio announcement told the world about the bombing of Hiroshima: by the time she retired, the first American troops were landing in Vietnam. All of which is to say that Barbara Mullen has lived through particularly eventful times, in particularly eventful places; Texas in the Depression, postwar New York, Paris at the end of couture's golden age, Klosters at its jetset-iest height. And that she's as surprised as anyone to find herself alive and kicking in the twenty-first century. And that, happy though she is to be vaccinated, she's still finding the restrictions of living through a global pandemic unacceptably boring. (What she actually says, by the way, is that it's 'perfectly agreeable'. Which in Barbara's lexicon means unacceptably boring - or worse.) Still, ninety-four. A day to celebrate, in a small way. And a day to look back, as well as forward. Since January, we've been posting a timeline of Barbara's career online, collecting every (known) published photograph taken of her; five months into the process, we're midway through 1949. While work on the book continues, you can see her progress in pictures on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter. To be continued . . .

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Or to be more precise, 'Ninety-FOUUUURRR'???? 

That's what Barbara Mullen shrieked when I called the other day. 'My birthday? Oh God, I forgot all about it. NINETY-FOUR. That's DIS-GUST-ING. That means I'm going to be a HUNDRED soon.' (Which is why she's staying put at 85, as she has for the past nine years.)

Ninety-four years since June 3rd, 1927. Barbara was barely a week old when Charles Lindbergh landed back in America to ticker-tape parades, a hero thanks to his transatlantic crossing; a year old when Mickey Mouse made his big-screen debut; two when the New York Stock Exchange collapsed, and five when they started building the Golden Gate Bridge. She made her first communion the year Jesse Owens swept the boards at the Berlin Olympics, and entered junior high just as World War Two ignited. She'd only just begun her first modelling job when a radio announcement told the world about the bombing of Hiroshima: by the time she retired, the first American troops were landing in Vietnam.

All of which is to say that Barbara Mullen has lived through particularly eventful times, in particularly eventful places; Texas in the Depression, postwar New York, Paris at the end of couture's golden age, Klosters at its jetset-iest height. And that she's as surprised as anyone to find herself alive and kicking in the twenty-first century. And that, happy though she is to be vaccinated, she's still finding the restrictions of living through a global pandemic unacceptably boring. (What she actually says, by the way, is that it's 'perfectly agreeable'. Which in Barbara's lexicon means unacceptably boring - or worse.)

Still, ninety-four. A day to celebrate, in a small way. And a day to look back, as well as forward. Since January, we've been posting a timeline of Barbara's career online, collecting every (known) published photograph taken of her; five months into the process, we're midway through 1949. While work on the book continues, you can see her progress in pictures on  <a href="https://www.instagram.com/1972projects/">Instagram</a>, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/TheReplacementGirl/">Facebook</a> or <a href="https://twitter.com/1972projects">Twitter</a>.

To be continued . . .


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Ninety-Four

Yesterday was Barbara Mullen's 91st birthday. Or it would have been, if Barbara hadn't decided (very sensibly, quite some time ago) to stay put at 85. It was also the first anniversary of our Unbound campaign; a full year since we started to finally assemble this long-in-the-making project, and a year since we began in-depth interviews with a whole host of Barbaras' contemporaries - fellow models, photographers, agents and editors amongst them, located everywhere from Argentina to Zurich. We've seen never-before-seen photoshoots, read unpublished memoirs and diaries, traced long-forgotten links and unearthed whole new chapters to the story. And yesterday morning, right on cue, our fundraising passed the halfway mark, none of which would have been possible without your generosity and support. As we embark on the next stages of the project, we just wanted to pause to reiterate our thanks - both from the (birthday) Replacement Girl, and from myself.

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 Yesterday was Barbara Mullen's 91st birthday. Or it would have been, if Barbara hadn't decided (very sensibly, quite some time ago) to stay put at 85. 


It was also the first anniversary of our Unbound campaign; a full year since we started to finally assemble this long-in-the-making project, and a year since we began in-depth interviews with a whole host of Barbaras' contemporaries - fellow models, photographers, agents and editors amongst them, located everywhere from Argentina to Zurich. We've seen never-before-seen photoshoots, read unpublished memoirs and diaries, traced long-forgotten links and unearthed whole new chapters to the story. And yesterday morning, right on cue, our fundraising passed the halfway mark, none of which would have been possible without your generosity and support. As we embark on the next stages of the project, we just wanted to pause to reiterate our thanks - both from the (birthday) Replacement Girl, and from myself.

One Year On

Renée Breton, 1956 It seems only fitting to be writing about Renée Breton in Paris, in the springtime. Three weeks younger than Barbara Mullen, she spent most of her career as one of Christian Dior’s most treasured muses. She embodied midcentury French elegance — and her career was in many ways the antithesis of that most top-flight American models enjoyed. Renée Breton hated change. She always insisted on the same dressing table at the Dior cabine, adored the unchanging routine of life as a house model, and hated foreign travel. Every day, she twirled and glided her way through the salons of Avenue Montaigne, a swan princess in the most spectacular couture creations — and every evening, while colleagues prepared to meet lovers, she changed back into unobtrusive clothes and took the bus home to her apartment near the Porte Maillot. It was a routine that had begun in 1947. when she was still only 19 years old, chosen by a little-known designer called Christian Dior to form part of his first line-up of models. In that incendiary first collection, Breton modelled Dior’s now-legendary Bar jacket; the photograph Willy Maywald took of her in that outfit had become the New Look’s defining image. And for the next ten years she continued to wear Dior’s collections, part of a loyal group of long-term employees that stayed by the designer’s side throughout his career. ‘Of all my mannequins,’ he wrote in 1956, ‘Renée is probably the one who comes nearest to my ideal. Every dress she puts on seems to be a success, as though there existed an exact equivalence between her proportions and those of my imagination. She brings fabric to life so exquisitely that her face is lost. As she shows her clothes, distant, aloof, it seems as if her very life centres around the folds of the material.’ For her part, Breton spoke little. ‘He’s very kind.’ was how she described her boss to American newspapers, on a rare foreign tour with Alla and Dior himself in the spring of 1957. By then, she was one of the most famous French models in the world — a fame that had come in part from Breton’s sideline as a photographic model, used over and over again as an exotic foil to the American mannequins that Vogue and Bazaar flew in to pose for the biannual couture collections. She was the star of Dior’s cabine — but she gracefully played second-fiddle for the big magazines, a fantasy of Frenchness opposite Mary Jane Russell in 1954 and 1955, and Barbara Mullen in 1956. Despite her homebody nature, she was out of the country when Dior died in the autumn of 1957. His other mannequins, most notably Alla Inchun, soldiered on under the new Saint-Laurent regime. But Breton, unexpectedly, made a clean break. “I felt I could not go back.” she confessed. “I loved M. Dior. It would be different without him.” Instead, she struck out for New York, and before the end of the year had signed with the Fords. She quickly became a popular editorial and runway model on the American fashion scene — most famously, perhaps, thanks to her inclusion in Erwin Blumenfeld’s groundbreaking ‘Rage for Color’ shoot for LOOK. “Of course, chez Dior I made less money.” she acknowledged. “But the work took not so much time . . . I am a funny Frenchwoman. I do not care for cusine.I eat little and if I must, I eat in a hurry.” She would model Dior’s Bar suit once more, for a glitzy museum benefit in Manhattan. In 1959, she married a successful hotel manager, but continued to work — first as a model, and then increasingly on the sales side. There was a stint at a Seventh Avenue manufacturer, and then a few seasons with a flashy young designer called José de Lema, who briefly operated out of the Hilton hotel. By the Seventies, she was ensconced at Saks Fifth Avenue, working with Revillon. When she died, in the spring of 1979, she got a glancing mention in the New York Times’ death notices, mourned only by her colleagues and her father.

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/f4aea8a81da532c9f6823022be6bd249.jpg?v=1690909780" width="392">


Renée Breton, 1956


 It seems only fitting to be writing about Renée Breton in Paris, in the springtime. Three weeks younger than Barbara Mullen, she spent most of her career as one of Christian Dior’s most treasured muses. She embodied midcentury French elegance — and her career was in many ways the antithesis of that most top-flight American models enjoyed.


    Renée Breton hated change. She always insisted on the same dressing table at the Dior cabine, adored the unchanging routine of life as a house model, and hated foreign travel. Every day, she twirled and glided her way through the salons of Avenue Montaigne, a swan princess in the most spectacular couture creations — and every evening, while colleagues prepared to meet lovers, she changed back into unobtrusive clothes and took the bus home to her apartment near the Porte Maillot. It was a routine that had begun in 1947. when she was still only 19 years old, chosen by a little-known designer called Christian Dior to form part of his first line-up of models.

    In that incendiary first collection, Breton modelled Dior’s now-legendary Bar jacket; the photograph Willy Maywald took of her in that outfit had become the New Look’s defining image. And for the next ten years she continued to wear Dior’s collections, part of a loyal group of long-term employees that stayed by the designer’s side throughout his career. ‘Of all my mannequins,’ he wrote in 1956, ‘Renée is probably the one who comes nearest to my ideal. Every dress she puts on seems to be a success, as though there existed an exact equivalence between her proportions and those of my imagination. She brings fabric to life so exquisitely that her face is lost. As she shows her clothes, distant, aloof, it seems as if her very life centres around the folds of the material.’ 

    For her part, Breton spoke little. ‘He’s very kind.’ was how she described her boss to American newspapers, on a rare foreign tour with Alla and Dior himself in the spring of 1957. By then, she was one of the most famous French models in the world — a fame that had come in part from Breton’s sideline as a photographic model, used over and over again as an exotic foil to the American mannequins that Vogue and Bazaar flew in to pose for the biannual couture collections. She was the star of Dior’s cabine — but she gracefully played second-fiddle for the big magazines, a fantasy of Frenchness opposite Mary Jane Russell in 1954 and 1955, and Barbara Mullen in 1956.

    Despite her homebody nature, she was out of the country when Dior died in the autumn of 1957. His other mannequins, most notably Alla Inchun, soldiered on under the new Saint-Laurent regime. But Breton, unexpectedly, made a clean break. “I felt I could not go back.” she confessed. “I loved M. Dior. It would be different without him.”

    Instead, she struck out for New York, and before the end of the year had signed with the Fords. She quickly became a popular editorial and runway model on the American fashion scene — most famously, perhaps, thanks to her inclusion in Erwin Blumenfeld’s groundbreaking ‘Rage for Color’ shoot for LOOK. “Of course, chez Dior I made less money.” she acknowledged. “But the work took not so much time . . . I am a funny Frenchwoman. I do not care for cusine.I eat little and if I must, I eat in a hurry.”

    She would model Dior’s Bar suit once more, for a glitzy museum benefit in Manhattan. In 1959, she married a successful hotel manager, but continued to work — first as a model, and then increasingly on the sales side. There was a stint at a Seventh Avenue manufacturer, and then a few seasons with a flashy young designer called José de Lema, who briefly operated out of the Hilton hotel. By the Seventies, she was ensconced at Saks Fifth Avenue, working with Revillon. When she died, in the spring of 1979, she got a glancing mention in the New York Times’ death notices, mourned only by her colleagues and her father.

Renée Breton, 1956

20 cities, in 4 time zones, in 4 weeks: it's been an action packed August for 'The Replacement Girl'. It's been quite a while since my last post - largely because, for the last month, I've been in the US to finish researching 'The Replacement Girl'. Starting and finishing in New York, the trip took in Connecticut, Washington DC, Maryland, West Virginia, Oregon, California, New Mexico, Texas and Kansas. The schedule was - to say the least - action-packed, dashing from coast to coast via 12 flights, 9 train rides, and 5 Greyhounds. But along the way I got to see thousands of pages of archive material and undiscovered images, stored everywhere from the Library of Congress to a Long Island boathouse. And I was finally able to interview many of the photographers, editors, writers, agents and models who shaped fashion photography in the Fifties, and to visit the locations where their lives and careers played out. But now I'm back in not-so-sunny-anymore London, adjusting to changes in temperature and time zone - and most importantly of all, with the materials for the book's final chapter.

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/RoadTrip.jpg?v=1690909783" width="392">



 20 cities, in 4 time zones, in 4 weeks: it's been an action packed August for 'The Replacement Girl'.


It's been quite a while since my last post - largely because, for the last month, I've been in the US to finish researching 'The Replacement Girl'. Starting and finishing in New York, the trip took in Connecticut, Washington DC, Maryland, West Virginia, Oregon, California, New Mexico, Texas and Kansas. The schedule was - to say the least - action-packed, dashing from coast to coast via 12 flights, 9 train rides, and 5 Greyhounds. But along the way I got to see thousands of pages of archive material and undiscovered images, stored everywhere from the Library of Congress to a Long Island boathouse. And I was finally able to interview many of the photographers, editors, writers, agents and models who shaped fashion photography in the Fifties, and to visit the locations where their lives and careers played out.

But now I'm back in not-so-sunny-anymore London, adjusting to changes in temperature and time zone - and most importantly of all, with the materials for the book's final chapter.

Road Trip

Ronnie Compton was one of the most glamorous models in America. Vera Lee was a merchant seaman’s daughter from Southampton. And Veronica Minette was the doomed widow of a Belgian count. But it would be decades before anyone realised that all three were the same woman. Ronnie Compton died twice — once in the London Blitz, and once in a Northern boarding house. The first time (as with so much of Compton’s life) was make-believe; the second was brutally real. Born in Hampshire in the spring of 1922, Vera Mary Lee was the second daughter of Frederick Butlin (a man who changed his name as often as his daughter would, and who gave her a surname he’d borrowed from his stepfather). Her mother, Frederick’s second wife, was German, and died of TB in a Southampton pauper’s hospital; Frederick remarried within the year, but abandoned his children. One brother was fostered, the other adopted, and six-year-old Vera and her older sister were sent to the local orphanage. By the age of 18, though, Vera had begun her own reinvention. A pretty, brown-haired teenager, she moved to London to embark on a modelling career. What ‘model’ may have meant, in the chaos of wartime London, is debatable. But Ronnie Lee was labelled as a popular ‘West End fashion model’ in the coverage of her wedding, at Paddington’s Registry Office, in the autumn of 1940 — though any press interest probably came from the fame of her new husband, Canadian boxer Joe Gollob, than from Lee’s own. Within the year, the press would have occasion to cover the Gollobs again. Their marriage was a stormy one. Joe, away in the army, grew jealous; Ronnie, at home in Bayswater, did little to allay his fears. She sued him in 1941, for attempting to strangle her; he counter-sued, claiming she’d been having an affair. Joe admitted the assault, and insisted Ronnie had provoked him; in return, she declared he’d ‘gone completely off his head’, but conceded she’d been seeing another man — a man whose ‘name she did not wish to mention.’ That man may (or may not) have been Charles Compton, a dashing naval officer turned diplomat who later married Veronica, and took her to New York in the winter of 1944. She and Gollob had presumably divorced by then — though he spun their relationship’s demise out into a three-hanky tearjerker, regaling Canadian newspapers with the story that their London home had been bombed in the Blitz, disabling and then killing his beautiful young bride. In 1946, still very much alive, Ronnie Compton was discovered by Richard Avedon whilst walking down Fifth Avenue. At 5’ 4”, she was shorter than any other topflight model of her day (even shorter than Dorian Leigh, her contemporary and occasional romantic rival). Yet she forged a successful career, working for a host of American photographers — who inevitably shot her in fascinated close-up, her heart-shaped face and sophisticated attitude compensating for those missing inches. And in 1950, she scored the ultimate modelling prize; an assignment to shoot the collections in Paris for Harper’s Bazaar. She posed for a series of spectacular Avedon spreads, in witty feathered hats and elegant gowns, the images carefully cropped to her torso and exquisite features. Thereafter, Compton faded from the day-to-day business of modelling; why bother, perhaps, when the high life was within tantalisingly achievable reach? Whilst still married to her second husband, she’d enjoyed public romances with billionaire Howard Hughes and marquis-turned-racing driver Fon de Portago. And she remained a gossip column regular for most of the Fifties, cutting a swathe through the most eligible bachelors America had to offer. But in 1959 she married Edmond Minette, an obscure Belgian count and factory owner, and moved to the family's castle near Liége, to finally begin her happy ever after. But Minette was dead within a decade — and, at almost fifty, his widow found herself alone; back home in Britain, and once again thrown back on her own devices. Within a few years, there was a new love interest; John Gartland, a young man from Sunderland, who would remain Veronica’s boyfriend for the rest of her life. They moved from London to South Shields, their up-and-down romance played out in a succession of the town’s down-at-heel guesthouses. Those who met Mrs. Minette spoke of her vaguely, but kindly. A trained nurse, they understood, who complained about Gartland's behaviour regularly; a quiet woman, who looked older than her years; a widow, who spoke with a faint foreign accent. By then, though, they were speaking of a dead woman. In September 1976, in their third-floor room at the Acropolis boarding house, Ronnie began complaining to Gartland again. ‘We were living on social security,” he confessed to police officers afterwards. “and she more or less said she was dissatisfied. She was going on about her life in Belgium and said she was being brought down to gutter level.” Gartland snapped, and attacked Compton, just as Gollob had thirty-five years before. But here was no doubt, this time. The coroner’s report concluded; ‘Asphyxia due to suffocation and manual strangulation. Defendant convicted of manslaughter.’ *With thanks to the Lee family for their extensive research into Veronica’s early years and later life.

Ronnie Compton, 1949

For much of the Forties and Fifties, American models dominated the world of fashion photography. The countercharge, when it finally came, started in Paris, where women like Sophie Malgat led the way from couture salons to magazine covers. Whenever France’s midcentury models are discussed, the name that inevitably leads the pack is Bettina; the redheaded, freckle-faced girl from Brittany who took the salons of Paris by storm, and then crossed the Atlantic to enchant Manhattan. But Sophie Malgat, by contrast, has always seemed slightly in shadow. Softly graceful where Bettina was earthy, elegantly sly instead of sharp, Malgat’s sophisticated looks won her spots as a house mannequin in the cabines of Hermès and Jacques Fath — where she met and befriended Bettina, forming one of modelling’s first great double acts. Born Simone Steur in Nice, Malgat arrived in Paris just as the city’s fashion landscape was transforming. In the late Forties, the couture houses that had once catered to a guarded elite were blossoming into global power-players, thanks to the surge in international fashion audiences. In parallel, France’s pret-a-porter industry was on the rise. And to serve both those markets, a raft of new magazines (led by Elle) boosted the demand for professional photographic models — a career which, to most well-brought-up French women, still smacked of scandal. But the models who worked in the couture houses, showing clothes in the salons for meagre salaries, had no such qualms. Malgat quickly became an industry favourite; renamed ‘Sophie’ by Fath, she worked regularly for L’Officiel, Marie France, Jardin des Modes and Vogue Paris in between shows. And during couture’s off seasons, she and Bettina ricocheted to and from New York, booking high-profile jobs with Gordon Parks, Nat Farbman, Mark Shaw, Milton Greene and Frances McLaughlin. Malgat offered photographers an exotic, irreverent alternative to her impeccably groomed, stylised American contemporaries. But compared to those contemporaries, Malgat’s career was short; by the mid-Fifties, when a young Guy Bourdin memorably shot her in front of a backdrop of gutted rabbits at a Parisian market, she'd all but retired. She’d begun dating Anatole Litvak (the Russian-born director of The Deep Blue Sea, Mayerling and All This and Heaven Too) a few years before; a bachelor ever since he’d divorced Hollywood star Miriam Hopkins in 1939, few had expected that Litvak would settle down again. But he and Malgat shocked everyone by marrying in Las Vegas in the winter of 1955, and embarking on a glamorous international life together. In the years that followed, she would work with her husband occasionally — taking on costume supervisor duties when he directed Five Miles to Midnight, for example, starring Anthony Perkins and a Guy Laroche-clad Sophia Loren. But for the most part, Madame Litvak seized new opportunities. She became a reporter for Paris Match, and fashion editor for the innovative womens magazine Femina; she dabbled in fashion design, and directed a play for one of her great friends, Françoise Sagan. The Litvaks entertained at their art-filled home on the Champs des Mars, and danced the night away in the city’s discotheques; they spent summers in their villa at St. Tropez (which Sophie designed), and winters on the slopes at Klosters — then home to a sophisticated, largely American expat set that included Greta Garbo, Irwin Shaw, Deborah Kerr, Peter Viertel and Barbara Mullen. As her Hollywood-accustomed husband once pointed out, “Switzerland is the nearest thing to the Unites States that you can get in Europe. Everything works, including the telephone, and its awfully pretty.” But Litvak never cut her ties with the fashion world; she simply swapped the runways for couture’s front row, joining the Duchess of Windsor, Francoise Hardy and Helene Rochas on the tiny gilded chairs that lined the salons of Dior, Laroche and Chanel. She became one of couture’s most high-profile shoppers; newspapers reported breathlessly on her changing favourites, season by season — smoking suits from Saint Laurent and Cardin, low-backed Marc Bohan dresses, sophisticated gowns from Molyneux and the latest in space-age fashion from Courrèges. “It’s as though I’m a new woman when I wear Courrèges.” she laughed to one reporter in the late Sixties. “Some women change their noses and eyes, [but] I don’t think I’ll ever go in for plastic surgery. Goodness knows, we all get fed up with ourselves.” Anatole Litvak died in the winter of 1974. His widow remained at the centre of Paris’s social whirl, always flanked by Sagan and dancer Jacques Chazot. But she only outlived him by a matter of years, dying in 1979 at the age of 53. All that remains of their fashionable life are his films and her pictures; everything else was quickly dispersed, sold off through the Drouot auction rooms a few days after Sophie's funeral.

Sophie Malgat, 1952

After a decade of modelling success, Tedi Thurman remained an unknown. But once she made the leap to broadcasting, she became a household name — and one of the industry’s first mainstream stars. Even today, there’s not much going on in the City of Midville, Georgia (pop. 269) — just a few flat streets of spread-out timber-sided houses, scattered round the intersection of Highway 17 and Route 56. But Dorothy Ruth Thurman, daughter of a local auto dealer, always seemed destined for a bigger life. ‘Oh, she was a . . . HELLION!’ her nephew laughs, remembering childhood stories about the Thurman family’s legendary black sheep. An aptitude for drawing led her to the University of Georgia, and then to the prestigious Corcoran School of Art in Washington. After her studies finished, her parents implored her to come back to Midville. But Dorothy had other ideas; she took a train to Manhattan, signed up with the Conover agency, and rebranded herself as Tedi Thurman. She was an instant success, arriving on the cover of Vogue with her very first shoot. But Thurman had, unbeknownst to anyone, arrived on the scene too late; her look — dramatic, Amazonian, almost aggressively sensual — went out of style just as her career began to take off. She managed to work steadily for the next seven years, regardless, for everyone from Cosmopolitan to Good Housekeeping, and even turned up as a gangster’s moll in Ed Wood’s B-movie classic, Jail Bait (a role that mainly consisted of Thurman pacing round her apartment in alluring negligees, snarling "I don’t like dead men littering up my place." as the body count rises.) But in 1955, a Today producer overheard Thurman’s rich, seductive drawl, and hired her to read the weather on Monitor, NBC’s flagship weekend radio show. She quickly became an audience favourite, archly purring lines like "Virginia will be very warm — and I’m just THRILLED for poor Virginia!” And before long, thanks to endless newspaper and magazine features, Thurman’s image became as familiar to the nation as her voice; a Technicolour goddess poured into clinging evening gowns, her lips painted into a permanent scarlet smear. Over the years, her name was linked with a succession of eligible admirers, from Montgomery Clift to Artie Shaw Joe DiMaggio. When one gossip columnist asked why she’d never accepted any of their proposals, Thurman batted the question away, laughing; "I’m afraid it’s because I’m like the weather — unpredictable!" What Thurman didn’t say, though, was that she was as good as married already. Since the early Fifties, she’d been locked in a stormy relationship with nightclub singer and producer Peggy Fears. Together, they opened the legendary Yacht Club at The Pines on Fire Island — a hotel, and a destination, that would become a magnet for Manhattan’s burgeoning queer scene. When Thurman’s NBC contract ended in the Sixties, the two women sold up and moved to Los Angeles, where Thurman eked out a living with TV bit parts (and where Fears would always coyly introduce her, to anyone who asked, as her niece.) Their partnership finally came to an end in the late Nineties, and Thurman spent the rest of her life shuttling between residences in West Hollywood and Palm Springs. She returned to the spotlight from time to time, basked amusedly, and patiently, in a nostalgic generation’s rediscovered affection for her, and putting in regular appearances at Monitor reunions. Stephen Sondheim might as well have been writing about her when he dreamt up the lyrics for ‘I’m Still Here’; ‘First you’re another / Sloe-eyed vamp / Then someone’s mother / Then you’re camp.’ As Miss Monitor, Tedi Thurman has a permanent (albeit tiny) place in the history of American pop culture. But her modelling career, such as it was, has been forgotten. All that remains are a series of pictures, taken over a span of several years, by Erwin Blumenfeld — the only photographer who ever seemed to see through Thurman’s vampy persona. He shot her filtered through frosted Lucite, or reflected in shards of mirror; her face splintered into disembodied fragments, showing glimmers of the frailer figure behind her bombshell exterior.

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/5._Tedi_Thurman.jpg?v=1690909794" width="388">


    After a decade of modelling success, Tedi Thurman remained an unknown. But once she made the leap to broadcasting, she became a household name — and one of the industry’s first mainstream stars.

    Even today, there’s not much going on in the City of Midville, Georgia (pop. 269) — just a few flat streets of spread-out timber-sided houses, scattered round the intersection of Highway 17 and Route 56. But Dorothy Ruth Thurman, daughter of a local auto dealer, always seemed destined for a bigger life. ‘Oh, she was a . . . HELLION!’ her nephew laughs, remembering childhood stories about the Thurman family’s legendary black sheep. An aptitude for drawing led her to the University of Georgia, and then to the prestigious Corcoran School of Art in Washington. After her studies finished, her parents implored her to come back to Midville. But Dorothy had other ideas; she took a train to Manhattan, signed up with the Conover agency, and rebranded herself as Tedi Thurman. 

    She was an instant success, arriving on the cover of Vogue with her very first shoot. But Thurman had, unbeknownst to anyone, arrived on the scene too late; her look — dramatic, Amazonian, almost aggressively sensual — went out of style just as her career began to take off. She managed to work steadily for the next seven years, regardless, for everyone from Cosmopolitan to Good Housekeeping, and even turned up as a gangster’s moll in Ed Wood’s B-movie classic, Jail Bait (a role that mainly consisted of Thurman pacing round her apartment in alluring negligees, snarling "I don’t like dead men littering up my place." as the body count rises.)

    But in 1955, a Today producer overheard Thurman’s rich, seductive drawl, and hired her to read the weather on Monitor, NBC’s flagship weekend radio show. She quickly became an audience favourite, archly purring lines like "Virginia will be very warm — and I’m just THRILLED for poor Virginia!” 

    And before long, thanks to endless newspaper and magazine features, Thurman’s image became as familiar to the nation as her voice; a Technicolour goddess poured into clinging evening gowns, her lips painted into a permanent scarlet smear. Over the years, her name was linked with a succession of eligible admirers, from Montgomery Clift to Artie Shaw Joe DiMaggio. When one gossip columnist asked why she’d never accepted any of their proposals, Thurman batted the question away, laughing; "I’m afraid it’s because I’m like the weather — unpredictable!"

    What Thurman didn’t say, though, was that she was as good as married already. Since the early Fifties, she’d been locked in a stormy relationship with nightclub singer and producer Peggy Fears. Together, they opened the legendary Yacht Club at The Pines on Fire Island — a hotel, and a destination, that would become a magnet for Manhattan’s burgeoning queer scene. When Thurman’s NBC contract ended in the Sixties, the two women sold up and moved to Los Angeles, where Thurman eked out a living with TV bit parts (and where Fears would always coyly introduce her, to anyone who asked, as her niece.) 

    Their partnership finally came to an end in the late Nineties, and Thurman spent the rest of her life shuttling between residences in West Hollywood and Palm Springs. She returned to the spotlight from time to time, basked amusedly, and patiently, in a nostalgic generation’s rediscovered affection for her, and putting in regular appearances at Monitor reunions. Stephen Sondheim might as well have been writing about her when he dreamt up the lyrics for ‘I’m Still Here’;


 ‘First you’re another / Sloe-eyed vamp / Then someone’s mother / Then you’re camp.’


    As Miss Monitor, Tedi Thurman has a permanent (albeit tiny) place in the history of American pop culture. But her modelling career, such as it was, has been forgotten. All that remains are a series of pictures, taken over a span of several years, by Erwin Blumenfeld — the only photographer who ever seemed to see through Thurman’s vampy persona. He shot her filtered through frosted Lucite, or reflected in shards of mirror; her face splintered into disembodied fragments, showing glimmers of the frailer figure behind her bombshell exterior.

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