MODELING IN PARIS – 3

THE MODELS I WORKED WITH
It was a wonderful time in Paris to be a model, the Fashion world was buzzing with new designers, photographers and models came to Paris from all over the world. I worked with some of them and often got booked with the same girls so you got to know them quiet well over the years, others you worked with once or twice, some I remember very well even if I worked with them only once, others I have forgotten, some become friends. I certainly have seen my share of beautiful girls and my first encounter with a model of whom I had seen tons of pictures was Jean Shrimpton in the studio of Vogue in London, I was very shy and she was very kind, did not work with her then, that was much later. Next I was booked with Donna Mitchell and I really liked her pictures and she was great, wonderful Beauty, very different, she had or has something very special. I was very impressed to work with her.

With Donna Mitchell for English Vogue, Ph. Treager

With Jill Kennington of whom I had seen many very nice pictures too, some by Helmut Newton. She was very beautiful but did not get to know her at all. Ph. James Moore

Here with Kecia Nyman The first time I met Kecia was in Morocco on a shoot with Helmut Newton, this picture is one of them, but we became friends much later and we talk over the phone often. Kecia is the girl who made most Magazine covers ever, I think something like 2000. Ph. Helmut Newton

With Benny, forgot her last name but she was very funny and Helmut Newton liked to book us together on several occasions. She has a model agency in her home country Denmark. We had fun. Ph.Helmut Newton

With Gunelle, she was pleasant to work with, very nice woman and then the wife of Hans Feurer. We met up in 2002 at the farewell show of Kenzo in Paris, she had not changed much, that long straight shiny hair… Ph. Hans Feurer

Ph. Hans Feurer
With Linda Morand. Did not hear from her or see her (of course saw her famous Jaqueline Kennedy pictures) until I googled myself on internet and found minimadmod60’s and there I was together with many other models of our time, all put together by Linda. We got in touch about 2 years ago and her website has grown and is wonderful and we became great cyber friends.

With Wallis Franken, Wallis was a lot of fun, very cheerful and we had some great times, especially if it was on location somewhere for a few days. We were often booked together and she became a friend for the time we were in Paris. She was a great model and very professional. So sorry but don’t know who was the photographer.

With Gunilla Lindblad. Don’t remember who was the photographer but this picture also came out in enormous posters all over the Metro and Paris and all of France I guess. Gunilla was the most commercial professional model around at that time, very beautiful, also smart and she got all the good commercial jobs. Saw her a few years ago in Amsterdam where she was scouting for a NY model agency, beautiful as ever, down to earth and realistic, I think she still occasionally models.

With Christina Steidten. We worked quiet a lot together but never got to really know her. It was always wonderful to work with her though and she was a very amazing model and always dressed very nice in her own style, yes she had style.

Picture: Francois Lamy.

Ph. Andre Carrara

With Eva Malstrom, Eva and I did many shoots together for Marie Claire and Italian magazines. She came, worked a lot and left, lovely woman and very beautiful…

With Jeannette Christianse Ph. Jo Francki
Jeanette was amazing and throughout the years we worked a lot together, I saw her blossom as a model and we became work friends. I was always happy when we were booked together and when she asked me to join the new Model Agency she and her boyfriend John Casablanca were setting up, I agreed. In a way I felt very guilty towards Models International who had been so super good to me and was a very good agency but… Jeanette was a friend. I was like always not very commercial, I should have asked for 1% of the company as we were hardly 10 girls when “Elite” was born and there was nothing to show this was going to work except for the top girls they got to join… I still am in contact with Jeannette who is a painter in NY and their son is the lead singer of the “Strokes”

With Vibeke Knudsen andMargrit Ramme PH. Hans Feurer

Both Vibeke and Margrit have worked with the greatest photographers and both are marvellous and wonderful, Helmut told me Margrit was very smart and I have seen Vibeke several times when we were living in LA some years ago and she and her husband have some of Salvador’s wonderful paintings in their collection. Great models.

Ph. Tony Kent

WithSusan Bottomly Always loved to work with Susan, we were and are great friends and to be booked with her were happy shoots, especially if it was with Tony. She is a very special wonderful person and you just have to click on her name to know more about her, love her.

WithLinda Evangelista Ph. Steven Meisel
Just have to say that it was a wonderful experience to work with Linda, for me she is the super super model going still strong after so many years, she is wonderful and very very professional and gorgeous.
There were others I don’t have pictures off but some stand out: Donyale Luna took my breath away and I gladly made space for her in front of the camera of Helmut Newton so she could do her thing, Jean Shrimpton, very funny, lots of humour and very pleasant and beautiful. Jessica Lange impressed me a lot, she stands out in my memories and not because she is a famous actress (and one of my absolute favourites) she was not that famous actress then but doing some modeling in Paris, she stands out because I felt she was a person true to herself and she has proven to me just that, love her. Angelica Huston is an other person I will remember working with because she was real fun and smart and for some strange reason we were booked together a few times, sorry to not have the pictures. Then there were other wonderful girls, wow, I have seen some beauties, the incredible eyes of Yolande Gilot, the sweet French beauty of Louise Despointes, the sexy personality of Barbara Carrera, in the street or anywhere we went all the men would follow her with their eyes, she was great fun too, the uniqueness of Ingmarie Lamy, she is still going strong being beautiful, Susan Moncur, she wrote ” they still shoot models, do they?” available on Amazon …. Sometimes you were booked with other models but each had their pages so in the different studios you would meet different models and cannot remember every one right now. Also met some models that I never worked with or saw in the studios but that I liked, like Verushka who was the girlfriend of a good friend of ours and he brought her to our studio, liked very much meeting Donna Jordan in Italy, she also had her own mind and last but not least Eija Vekha Aho, so gorgeous, it was like she was made of marble. A wonderful model and inspiration to many artists like Antonio Lopez with whom she had a strong bond, as well as for my husband who made several portraits of her. She is a very very dear friend, very special and a great model. I only have a picture she did of me and Salvador in our studio.

… and here my personal favourite model at that time: Alejandro

Well, I think that was a lot but still much to tell, more girls to meet when I take you to the Catwalk next time… and check Alegria’s blog and follow Salvadors story like always, they go together,

LOVE and PEACE

.. and remember to click on the highlighted names, it gives you a link to that person, it took me a lot to do this so please enjoy!

MODELING IN PARIS 2

Modeling is fun but also hard work. One has to be in shape and look good because a lot of people are depending on it. At times it meant taking the plane very early in the morning to arrive at a studio in Hamburg or Milan at 9 and be ready to face a rack of clothes that all have to be photographed within a certain time as everything costs a lot of money. On a commercial job you sometimes had to change clothes 20 or 25 times and mostly the clothes were not that exciting and at the end of the day you would be so exhausted that it was dinner and to sleep, get up early again… working through the day and fly home, arriving at night and the next day up early again for that booking at Elle or Vogue which were much more fun and relaxing but doesn’t bring home the bacon. There were some very good photographers around and the time in Fashion was exciting as many new talents were emerging, Thiery Mugler , Claude Montana, Gaultier, Alaiia, Isy Miyaki, Yamamoto, Kenzo and more but will talk about that in an other post. Also photographers with a different vision came up……

LAURENCE SACKMAN

This was part of a series called: <Artist and their model> ( see Salvador in my glasses)

Laurence Sackman ( he is English) had his very own taste and style and he knew precisely the effect he wanted to get so it was for me really like working together with him to get that effect, which was not always easy but always interesting and like he said himself “I only shoot the picture when I see it”. Always enjoyed working with Laurence and we did a lot of things for Marie Claire and also publicity. We were good friends with him and Remi, his wife and inspiration, and their daughter Apple who was very close friends of Alejandro.

♡HANS FEURER….

Loved the pictures of Hans ( from Swiss) and liked to work with him although it was not always easy. If it did not work for some reason he would get really frustrated and you feel a sort of guilty because you think maybe it is you who cannot make it work but there are a lot of things that may influence the outcome of a picture that is to be published and judged by many. The stylist is very important, a good stylist can make the dreariest outfit look glamorous, the light is of course very important, especially when working on location outside where the light does what it wants, the surroundings and the mood you got up with are important too…

love his pictures and he is a friend, his daughter Malin was also very good friends with Alejandro…

APPLE, ALEJANDRO and MALIN on a summer day…

♡TONY KENT….

Loved to work with Tony, always nice people around, relaxed atmosphere, good music and great pictures. We were very good friends of Tony and his wife Susan Bottomly and he often booked Susan and me together… They are no longer together but both still dear friends, so many memories together…

♡ANDRE CARRARA

Andre was very pleasant to work with, very professional and could make you look good…

♡ERIC BOMAN

Working with Eric, who is an English photographer( working in Paris then), was relaxed and you could be sure to get a really good picture of yourself…

♡BARRY LATEGAN

Working with Barry was great, he was very soft spoken and gentle and it was really easy…Think it is so funny that I am holding my own bag in a Vogue shoot.

♡SACHA

Sacha is from Holland, working in Paris where she had a fabulous studio. She was one of the very few female Photographers around then. Like her pictures very much.

♡ALBERTA TIBURZI

Alberta was a model herself before she became a professional photographer so she knew how to treat a model. She is from Italy.

♡OLIVIERO TOSCANI

Always great fun to work with Toscani (also form Italy) as we have worked together so much from the time when he first started… if you think this picture is easy try it in front of the mirror and like me imagine there is a balcony you can rest your high heeled foot on holding on to a cord that is not really strongly attached anywhere and smile, click…click, HOLD IT… click click…

♡DAVID BAILEY

Working with David was always pleasant, he is very funny and down to earth, English that is. Since you knew he would make good pictures you felt good and confident. He had it very clear, what and how he wanted it, so you only had to fill in so to speak.…

♡JO FRANCKI

Jo booked me quiet a lot for Elle or publicity and it was super easy and nice working with him and he often booked me together with Christina Steidten and going to work was like meeting up with friends and do something creative. Jo was French I am almost sure but writing all this I realize that most photographers I worked with were from other places, either working in Paris like Helmut and Laurence and Sacha or they booked me in London or Milan or… Bockelberg in Germany, very well remembered by all the girls hat were modeling at that time.. Francois Lamy, he made you look so good… once I worked with Guy Bourdin and the picture he did won some award in a magazine, Jean Loup Sieff was also a wonderful photographer, his pictures were very meticulously prepared and actually one felt like an object, beautiful for sure but… and there were other fantastic studios in Paris, I can not put everything here but I even worked once with Patrick Demarchelier who just started out and Alex Chatelaine, Steve Hiett and others… of the girls I met and worked with I like to talk in my next post, the Fashion shows were taking off.. YSL needs a post apart too and oh, there are so many things going on… also at home where Salvador is making some incredible paintings,➜ CLICK HERE to see his work on ALEGRIA’s Blog.

LOVE AND PEACE

MODELING IN PARIS- 1

HELMUT NEWTON.

Helmut Newton has a post apart because I worked a lot with him, from the beginning of my time as a Fashion model, and although he had already done some fine work for a.o. English Vogue, Newton still was relatively new too. One of my first bookings with him was the series of the plane flying over my head…

and immediately after that a 16 page spread for French Elle at the Montreal World Fair.

I remember Mdm Lazareff ( Editor and owner of Elle, in that time there was only a French Elle) protested that he could not go so far with only one model, what if it does not work? But Helmut insisted and that series put me on the map. He booked me every day he could and it was when I was on a trip to Morocco with him that I met my husband and did not go back to London with the crew but stayed in Marrakesh. Months later I was invited to disclose my window display doll in London and worked again with Helmut doing the series of me and the dolls,

but I left again and this time for 3 years. When I came back to Paris in 1971 we worked a lot together again and did some great pictures for French Vogue,

Elle and others, but again I left. If I would not have disappeared trice I would have worked with him much more. He suggested once to put me under contract, something he said, he would never think of with any other model, but I am not a contract person and besides he would always have first option, which was not exactly true because if he would book me for 3 or 4 days for editorials and at the same time I could do a good commercial job, I would choose the latter unless it was not attractive, also there were many good Photographers in Paris I wanted to work with.

Now, here I was again 2 years later and was booked by Helmut Newton for French Vogue. I was to be at the Vogue studio at 2 p.m., which I thought was a bit odd because usually one is booked from the morning and when I opened the door to the studio dressing room I saw 5 or 6 models there. I remember so well that image, I was shocked like, oh I am no longer the one! But once I got on the paper, dressed up, made up and incredible hair by Jean Louis David himself, things were clear, Helmut sent the other models home. This was an incredible session, all the people working at Vogue came out to look and Helmut was shouting : Marvelous, Marvelous! that’s what he used to say when things went his way. Yes, I was back and Helmut told me afterwards that he was scared that I had lost it on my travels and that is why he had asked the other models, to make sure.

This was the series… Well, part of it…
… in Salvador’s sunglasses..and love this fantastic series in Nova, Caroline Baker was the name of the fabulous stylist

and the following series too… was fun

For me it was great to work with Helmut, he would never shoot rolls and rolls like some photographers, he would not click if it did not look good, he knew exactly what he wanted. It was intense, he would see everything”… that little finger on your left hand”… but it was exciting, something was happening between the camera and me, he sort of disappeared and gave me the space in front of the camera as if I was taking pictures of myself. It worked most of the time but not always, at times it was not right, the clothes, the light, the idea, something could frustrate him and then it was very difficult. This is one of those, I dislike it but did some Photoshopping and like it better that way,

somehow he wanted to get the American Pop thing… with the sharp shadow and the more I look at it the more I like it.

He was a gentle man and to me always very kind, he sort of understood me and so did June. Dear June, his wife( also an accomplished Photographer later) she was almost always there and a great inspiration for Helmut as they plotted the ideas for the pictures together. We did quiet some work for publicity that were never published and sometimes he would give me original prints or slides ( that years later were stolen from my car in Madrid along with a lot of other precious belongings, probably by a junky who threw it all away). Salvador and I sometimes had dinner at their studio, I really liked both of them although we were never really close friends. When he had had his heart attack I never more worked with him and also he was not doing that much Fashion anymore but started his Nude series and photographing celebrities. In 2002, I was living in Amsterdam, when he had an important exhibition in Berlin and to honor him they had invited from each country the most prominent Photographer and from Holland they had chosen Paul Huf with whom I had worked decades ago but was a friend and when he told me he was going to Berlin I wrote a letter with some nice pictures of the family, a sort of photo shop collage and gave it to Paul who was delighted to give it to Helmut. When he came back he had a letter from Helmut for me in which he said that it was the nicest letter he had ever received and he was very touched and there was a picture of him and Paul Huf in front of a big picture of me and I in turn was very touched. We went to his funeral celebration in Paris, he was a great photographer, making pictures was his love and passion, it was his life and I must say he left a big legacy.

June making a toast to Helmut at that special dinner that followed the funeral celebration.

and Salvador at the Dinner table with Christian Louboutin, the shoe designer and below Veruschka, me and Jean Paul Gaultier.

Almost every name in the Fashion world was there, Anna Wintour, Eileen Ford, Tom Ford, Lagerfeld and so on , was very impressive to see June after so many years…

This is an invitation to his latest exhibition in Berlin 2008-9

But we are still in Paris, it is 1973 and I had just turned 32!

PARIS, PARIS JE T’AIME

Ah, beautiful Paris in spring!

It is March 1973 and Paris looks gorgeous and inviting. Of course first things on the list were: find a place and let my agency know I am in Paris. At first we stayed with our friend Cooky Debidour and we checked the “for rent” lists, ideal would be an “Atelier de Artist” ( Artist Studio) and so we found an agent to look for us and they sent us to our first appointment that looked interesting because it was a little house surrounded by a garden. When we saw it we liked it although it was not very big, 2 floors and not very light but very nice, so we thought to maybe take it. But then a young woman came looking at it as well and she fell completely in love with it and she begged us to let her have it because she had already seen so many places and this was the one! We asked her if she had seen an Atelier d’ Artist and she said YES! 11 Rue de Douai, fantastic place, really good for you! We told her to hang on and went to see the address she had mentioned and we on our turn fell in love with that place when we saw it. A beautiful old elevator brought us to the 4th floor and we could not believe the beauty of it all, a big artist studio with an enormous skylight, an incredible wooden sculpted fire place so big you could stand in it, a grand entrance which was actually a room, a lovely kitchen, a very big bathroom and a very nice bedroom with big French windows, very high ceilings and a white marble fire place, that did not work but looked good. Double doors would open to the studio which besides the skylight also had 2 big windows to the street so the light was impressive. The entrance and the kitchen had both big windows to the courtyard, OK! My heart was booming, what a place, unbelievable! But to our big disappointment the lady said NO, she did not want to rent it to us. That was a blow and we started depressed going down the stairs. She must have felt how sorry we were because halfway between the third and second floor she called us back and asked Salvador if he was a painter and when that was confirmed everything changed, we went back up and heard the story of her father who was a painter and had build this studio ( and the whole building) in around 1890 and the whole building was hers and she herself lived in an other part higher up that in the olden days had been connected to the studio and that’s why there was this beautiful stairs and balcony there.

Alejandro and his friend Apple Sackman on the balcony

Now we were so happy, finally our own place, right in Pigalle near Place Clichy ( Moulin Rouge). A very interesting area where a lot of artists had lived and still lived, easy walk to Rue Lepic with its marvellous market, walking distance to Gare St Lazare and the Opera. In short a great place! Now we only had to make sure we could pay the rent which was quiet a lot at the time.

Here you get an idea, I am sitting in the bottom corner on the left.

We had all our things, including our beautiful heavy Spanish table, beds that we had had made up, paintings, carpets and everything else sent from Madrid and when it all arrived and was put into place we were the happiest people on earth.

We stayed 8 years in Paris and did a lot of work so I have to divide that in several posts and honestly, at times it is difficult to remember exactly which year it was and I easily mix up 73 with 74 or 75 but that does not really matter I guess, It would be possible to do it exact but it would take a lot of time, so I hope you don’t mind.

Salvador started painting, it’s all he wanted to do, when friends came over he would continue working or make drawings of the friends,.

and made this wonderful painting of our bedroom.

Alejandro having a snack in the kitchen, look at that light!

Alejandro went to Ecole Bilinque in a beautiful place at Parc Monceau so he could learn to speak French and correct English. He spoke English already and Spanish but it was a good way for him to learn French. It was a very expensive private school and he was in the class with the son of Sophia Loren who I saw sometimes there picking up her son like other mothers. Alejandro looked so cute with his dark blue uniform and his big schoolbag. After a year or 2 when he spoke French fluently we thought it was ridiculous to pay so much money every month as he was already a full-blood Bilinque and the school was nothing special, just very chic and in a wonderful place, loved the Parc Monceau. Later he went to a Rudolf Steiner school and those, yes, are very special.

I myself was still with “Models International” and my first booking was with Helmut Newton for French Vogue….