The Truth About Modelling

By Jean Shrimpton and Romany Bain

‘My only purpose is to write the kind of book that I would have liked to have read when I started.’
Jean Shrimpton, 1964

Icon of the sixties and one of the first supermodels, Jean Shrimpton rose to fame alongside photographer David Bailey. Together they revolutionized fashion photography with a new gritty street style. Perceptive, personal and disarming, The Truth About Modelling covers the early years of Shrimpton’s life and career including her transformation at Lucie Clayton’s modelling school from a naive country-loving teenager into a Vogue and Harper's Bazaar cover girl. She describes the frenetic life of a model in the 1960s and making a success of working with renowned photographers such as John French, Norman Parkinson, Terence Donovan, Brian Duffy and of course Bailey. Offering a fascinating insight into both sides of the camera, she includes her own interviews with the photographers and tips from many of her model contemporaries, including Celia Hammond and Tania Mallet. Timeless in its wisdom, this lively autobiographical guide to the art and business of modelling will inspire anyone setting out on the same path today.

First published in 1964, this book is part of the V&A Fashion Perspectives Series. Selected by V&A publishing in consultation with our world-leading fashion curators, the Fashion Perspectives series offers an access all areas pass to the glamorous world of fashion. Models, magazine editors and the designers themselves take readers behind the scenes at the likes of Balenciaga, Balmain, Chanel, Dior, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue in the golden age of couture.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: V&A Publishing
• Release date: May 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781851779864

Book preview

PRELUDE

When I began modelling three and a half years ago there was nothing to guide me as to what it was all about, except what I had picked up from magazines and what I had been taught by the instructresses at the very good model school which I attended. But there was no permanent record of what this now huge profession was all about, or how to enter it.

In order that no one should buy this book with any false idea of its contents I must declare immediately that my only purpose is to write the kind of book that I would have liked to have read when I started. The Truth about Modelling is intended to be an up-to-the-minute statement of the types of modelling available, the way to go about getting work, the pitfalls and the hazards, and, of course, of how I started and of my own experiences in photographic modelling. For her research in the sections with which I am less familiar and for her help in the writing I am indebted to Romany Bain. Any mistakes, however, are all my own!

Ours is a wide field, and chapter headings are given not only to attract readers, but equally to warn them off areas with limited appeal for them.

Almost everyone whom I have met at the very top, on both sides of the camera, has their say about modelling in this book. It is rather harder however to interview someone one knows very well, and I am most grateful, therefore, to all my old friends who helped me by being patient, especially Celia Hammond, Lucie Clayton, Tania Mallett, Sandra Paul, John French, Norman Parkinson, Terence Donovan, and Brian Duffy.

JEAN SHRIMPTON

THE TRUTH ABOUT JEAN SHRIMPTON by ROMANY BAIN

What is the truth about modelling? Or what is even more intriguing, what is the truth about its most successful exponent, Jean Shrimpton? This young woman is an acknowledged phenomenon. Her name is as famous as her face, which in the anonymous world of which she is queen, is itself reason enough for a crown.

Her face has graced seventeen Condé Nast covers in twelve months. For the last three years she has topped all modelling charts in England, and at 21 is now acclaimed as the world’s greatest by both Paris and New York.

Her earning power is immense. She can make £5,000 a year over here, and at least £20,000 in America. Her freedom is unlimited. She can chose to work in any glittering capital or far-flung outpost on her own terms.

If the world of the mid-60’s belongs to the young she is their symbol and fashion-plate. She is the one they identify themselves with. Gamine or goddess, she is the one they wish to be.

It is not only her face that is photogenically perfect. Her body is faultless too. It is like a fashion drawing. All her limbs have that exaggerated length that make her the most sought after feminine coat hanger in the world. I defy anyone to take a bad picture of her with a Brownie in a pea soup fog. She’d look like Aphrodite.

She has also been blessed with a brain which she knows how to use, allied to a great sensitivity to the trends and temperatures of the present scene.

Even these golden assets could not establish her at the top for three years. No public is more fickle and cries out more often for a change of face than the British. Jean’s greatest strength is her adaptability. Tomboy, deb, waif or sophisticate are all within her range. She can appear as a denimed kook, an English blossom and a sabled heiress on as many pages of the same glossy and each seems to be absolutely her.

But which really is? I have watched her work. She offers each photographer her professionalism, her capacity for hard work, her exquisite looks and her intelligence.

I saw her do some close-ups with John French wearing a pink gingham dress, a streamered boater, and minute white gloves.

Her props were a bench and table. The atmosphere was relaxed and informal. There was a bit of gossip while a few adjustments were made to her dress, and the screens and camera were finally positioned. Then she placed her hands under her chin and was ready for work. The routine was the same between each shot. She moistened her lips, dropped her eyes, paused and fractionally turned to the camera with them startlingly open, sending over a series of inviting messages that only the retarded could fail to understand. She was gay, provoking, mischievous, displeased in as many moments. Each of the forty shots was different and apparently spontaneous, and all executed with an economy of movement and a power of projection that would have melted the lens. Yet all were suitable for a ginghamed milkmaid.

I have seen her spend a morning as an efficient receptionist, hair swept up, pencil poised, and shirt starched. She was a tycoon’s personal treasure. Mr Clore would have engaged her on the spot, with her alert face, intelligent mien, and obvious speed of 120.

I have watched her stun the natives standing against a marble colonnade in olive satin and phantom mink like an imperious Russian Empress dismissing her serfs. But which is the real Shrimp? None of them. She is a chameleon who can change her whole personality at will. She can so sink herself into the mood of the clothes, so intuitively understand how they should be presented and what the photographer wants, that she becomes a flesh and blood extension of what he dreams of creating.

But this is her public image. Off duty, her private life is a gesture against the artificial climate that all models are forced to inhabit. In the true genre of all the top photographic girls, she looks attractively unkempt a lot of the time. Her hair is long, and by her own admission, scraggy. Her fringe is wild and habitually catches on her preposterous lashes causing her to blink myopically and grope about trying to untangle it. Her eyes are huge and always heavily made up, and if the rest of her face is pallid it is by design.

Her clothes are casual. I have met her in faded denims in Bond Street. But her formal clothes are stunningly simple. She has one or two garments which no one but Shrimp could wear. My favourite recollection is of her choice of country kit. She called one morning in her black Mini Traveller to take me to meet her parents who live in Buckinghamshire. She was late. She leapt from the car, her head a sight Medusa might have envied, her body encased in a huge shaggy Mongolian lamb coat, beneath which emerged a pair of pale pipe cleaner legs garbed in beige woolly knee length socks, and suede T-strap flatties.

Beneath was a cream polo-necked sweater, and a black skirt she had knitted herself on giant needles in three days making up the pattern as she went along. She looked divinely improbable, but perfectly at home. Our road has never been the same.

But Jean was unaware of the turmoil she created in the suburban breast. This was how she liked to dress. This was her.

Her attitude to most things is simple, individual and unaffected. Her happy country childhood and convent schooling set standards of normal behaviour which success has not undermined. And with all her experience of life since, she still retains the naiveté of the truly childlike. It is as refreshing as it is unexpected.

Her shyness in public is no affectation. I have followed her into a restaurant and seen her try to find the angle of approach from which fewest people will notice her entering. I have seen her crunched up in the darkest corner, sipping orange juice, which is the hardest stuff she drinks. Nor does she smoke. Walking into a room of people she is as unrelaxed as if she were going to the stake.

I am not suggesting that she is not conscious of her looks, and jealous of her position as top model. But her fame, instead of giving her confidence, has made her believe she is a sitting target for criticism. It has made her more cautious of making an exhibition of herself, one of the things she dreads most. She won’t dance, for instance, because she swears she has no natural sense of rhythm and will only do things she can do well. To get up on a dance floor and struggle would be torture.

Three years ago Shrimp was ‘a county chick, all MGs, Daddy, and chinless wonders’. The quotation is David Bailey’s, whose direction has meant so much to her. Her acceptance of his description is a measure of his influence. No girl could be more generous in her estimate of his help than she is. She says that she owes almost everything she is as a model and as a woman to him.

It was Bailey’s East End shrewdness and dynamic personality that set Shrimp on the real road to success. He saw in her the material all photographers dream they will one day find.

Many are not bold enough to seize the chance when they get the opportunity. Others have not enough talent. Bailey had both.

He saw in her a ravishing photogenic girl who had already learnt the rudiments of modelling, having been in the business for seven months. She had the right face, an unbelievable frame, an individual approach, a natural style, and she was not afraid of being herself.

She neither copied nor mimicked, and possessed sensitivity and intelligence. But she was country bred and unaware of the real world of fashion or photographers. She could not yet project, had no feeling for the mood of clothes, or for design, and no idea, in fact, what it means to be a good photographic model. Bailey’s plan did not stop at her being merely good. He wanted Shrimp at the very top.

He was the Svengali who brought this particular Trilby to life. They have been an ideal partnership, and among fashion people they will never be forgotten.

Shrimp has done nearly all her best work in this country for Bailey. Her tenure of office as the top model will inevitably end sometime, but the fact that she has held the position for three years without a rival happily disproves the old saw that a top model’s life is necessarily brief.

I don’t envy her successor. She will have to be exceptionally gifted. For a girl of Shrimp’s calibre is born only once in a decade. Her success is not due to a trick of the face that she has acquired, or a piece of cleverness. Her tutors have not so much taught her an art as brushed away the artificialities and self-consciousness which mask so many English beauties, and underneath found diamond. Beneath the county chick Shrimp is a natural, and this is a rare species.

CHAPTER ONE

WHO CAN, WHO CAN’T

Thousands of teenagers, if you believe what you hear, dream of becoming top models, of whom at any one time there are about six. They see themselves on the covers of their favourite magazines, divinely decorative and assured of a cool hundred a week for the occasional snap. I wish that even the dream were true.

Modelling is a profession which appeals to both the idle and the unsuccessful. It has had a glittering attraction for indolent debs, ever since the fabulous Fiona Campbell Walter made it socially acceptable a few years ago, whose Mummies can’t think what else they could do. It also encourages romantic secretaries with good measurements and poor shorthand to imagine themselves lazing on location in the Bahamas. As I was a reluctant shorthand-typist-student not very long ago, my sympathies are with them.

But I am afraid I am going to disillusion them. Modelling is the toughest full-time job I know. The competition gets fiercer and the standards climb higher every year. You have to be totally professional and absolutely dedicated to make the grade at all. You may certainly earn a lot of money, but believe me, you will have earned every penny of it.

You don’t have to be conventionally beautiful to be a working model, as long as your dimensions are exact. You can have the face of Hepburn, Moreau, and Bardot rolled into one, but if you have a 27-in. waist it’s unlikely you will even begin.

Most people have no idea that there is more than