In yesterday's post we looked through a fashion collection at ballet and this form of art is based on grace and elegance. Let's continue the thread to focus on the grace and poise of an early model, Bettina Graziani who died last Monday.
Born in 1925 in France, Simone Micheline Bodin actually wanted to become a fashion designer and one of her first jobs consisted in tinting drawings for an architect. When she moved to Paris she started searching for work as a designer, but it was the looks of the freckled, red-head Simone rather than her sketches that attracted the attention of the local couturiers such as Jacques Costet. In the meantime, Simone married Gilbert "Benno" Graziani, a French photographer and reporter (from whom she divorced in 1950).
Fascinated by her carefree attitude, young image and personality Jacques Fath invited her to become one of his models. Since he already had a model named Simone in his team, he rechristened her Bettina and suggested her to restyle her hair, getting a "Greek shepherd" cut.
Between the '40s and the '50s Bettina worked as a model for Fath and Lucien Lelong among the others becaming a muse to Hubert de Givenchy after Fath's premature death in 1954. Bettina actually worked for Givenchy not just as a model but also as a press agent.
Givenchy even named one of his first collections and his most famous blouse after her, and she also inspired the bottle for Givenchy parfum "Amarige". The designer and the model also travelled to New York together for a benefit event at the Waldorf-Astoria, appearing in a television interview with newsman Edward R. Murrow.
After two years with Givenchy, Bettina worked as a freelance model, while creating a line of sweaters for Hungarian manufacturer, Monsieur Hein. She retired from modelling in the mid-'50s after meeting Prince Aly Khan, former husband of Rita Hayworth, socialite, race horse owner and United Nations ambassador from Pakistan.
She wrote her autobiography - Bettina par Bettina (Bettina by Bettina,1964) after Khan died in a car accident and briefly modelled again in the late '60s for Coco Chanel, becoming press agent for Emanuel Ungaro in the '70s and also working for Valentino. In 2010 she was named a commander of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government.
One of the highest paid models in the world (in the mid-Fifties, Graziani commanded 7,000 francs per hour, about $1,330), dubbed by French magazine Paris Match "the most photographed woman in France", Bettina personified elegance and grace in famous shoots by Erwin Blumenfeld, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Willy Rizzo, Horst P. Horst, Henry Clarke, Irving Penn, Gordon Parks, Robert Capa, Robert Doisneau, and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
In more recent years Bettina continued to be a muse, a cult model and a fashion icon for many other designers: she could still be spotted every now and then in the front row at selected fashion shows such as Givenchy and Christian Dior's couture.
Azzedine Alaïa remains among her admirers: last year the designer celebrated her at his Parisian gallery with an exhibition of photographs that retraced her career. Some of the images included in this event were taken over 50 years ago, but they still look inspiring and visually reveal a fashion truism: there are many beautiful models with dramatic necklines in the contemporary fashion industry and every season there are designs out there characterised by bold and striking silhouettes, yet what's definitely missing is a healthy dose of that innate elegance that Bettina Graziani had in copious amounts.
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