A few glasses of champagne had sharpened my ideas of independence, and, eyes wide open on the darkness, I organized a new life for myself: I should get a job. No more question of allowing myself to be hampered by the bourgeois ties of the family, of marrying a charming, utterly suitable and harmless boy. I should travel, I should live without owing anything to the paternal bank account.
Freddy, Flying Mannequin: Memoirs of a Star Model . As told to Jean Carlier (Trans. Kitty Black) (London: Hurst and Blackett Ltd, 1958), pp. 24-25.
… as she [model agent] looked at me her eyes got larger and larger and her eyelashes flapped up and down as if she had just seen a vision that was too dazzling to contemplate. That was me, I suppose.
Susan Chitty, Diary of a Fashion Model (London: Methuen & Co, 1958), p.1.
They [mannequins] have very little to do with life as usually lived on this planet, sitting there gossiping together, hardly paying any attention to the compliments paid them. When they get up and walk away their gait is not of this world either.
Ginette Spanier, It Isn’t All Mink (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1959), p. 210.
Roland Paterson insists that his girls must be in love with two things. ‘They must be fanatical about clothes, their own and mine. They must have the good taste which makes them tie their scarves at just the right dashing angle when they pop out to lunch. And they must be so in love with themselves that they can take an hour making themselves up, then look in the mirror, dislike it, and start all over again. In the salon, they can be marvellous wooden nothings throughout the fittings and while getting ready to show. But when they walk out before the client must become divine.
Jean Shrimpton, My Own Story: The truth about modelling (New York: Bantam Books, 1965), p. 125.
John Cavanagh says that… “A couture model looks at herself in the glass, but sees only the dress, senses its design and adapts her whole self to it.”
Jean Shrimpton, My Own Story: The truth about modelling (New York: Bantam Books, 1965), p. 130.
I had ‘stolen’ their models. Indeed, a mannequin grows attached to the dresses she presents, and it is a real torment when she sees them on somebody else.
Freddy, Flying Mannequin: Memoirs of a Star Model. As told to Jean Carlier (Trans. Kitty Black) (London: Hurst and Blackett Ltd, 1958), pp. 24-25.
Top of the constantly dramatic human beings and the most human of all because they are bird-brained, idiotic, charming and completely sincere, are the mannequins. Most people have a fixed idea of a mannequin. Mannequins, in most minds, are synonymous with the Naughty Nineties. Men who take out model girls to-day have acquired the same sort of reputation as the stage-door johnnies of 1899. Mannequins are Gaiety Girls of the twentieth century. But nowadays nobody “keeps” the mannequins in guilty splendour… In the twentieth century a man’s mannequin comes quite far down his list of expenses… Jewels, mink coats, little powder boxes of gold and platinum, which everyone imagines dangling from these beautiful creatures (making them look like so many dear little Christmas trees), are more or less non-existent.
Ginette Spanier, It Isn’t All Mink (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1959), p. 205-6.
… the heady odour of expensive perfumes, miles of precious silk, long, slim, half-naked bodies, lovely faces, beautifully made-up. And animating it all, a gaiety that is a little strained, a little nervous.
Freddy, Flying Mannequin: Memoirs of a Star Model. As told to Jean Carlier (Trans. Kitty Black) (London: Hurst and Blackett Ltd, 1958), p. 90.
The whole atmosphere, with its huge lamps, cables and air of unreality, made me feel quite hopeless.
Jean Dawnay, How I became a fashion model (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, 1958), p. 28.
It was a little disappointing, though, to realise that no-one noticed me, or connected me with the glamorous creature on a magazine cover, as I stood gazing at the bookstall display!
Jean Dawnay, How I became a fashion model (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, 1958), p. 46-47.
Remember that the model girl is one in ten thousand; the top model is one in a million.
Suzy Menkes, How to be a Model (London: Sphere books Ltd, 1969), p. 140.
© Inga Fraser 2006
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