“You are, in a word, the embodiment of the modern woman,” the former model Bettina Graziani was told in 2010 when she was appointed to France’s Order of Arts and Letters.
This was not just flattery. As arguably the face of the New Look in the late 1940s, Graziani had symbolised the aspirations of a generation of liberated French women. However, she was not merely a mannequin: she made bold choices in her career and at times courageous ones in her personal life. She knew tragedy, too, having lost her fiancé Prince Aly Khan in the accident that also claimed their unborn child.
Born in Brittany in 1925 as Simone Bodin, she grew up in Normandy where her father worked for the railways. He abandoned the family, however, and she and an older sister were raised by their mother, a teacher.
Dreaming of becoming a fashion designer, she moved to Paris after the Allies had liberated the city and found work as a babysitter and colouring drawings for an architect. When she was introduced to the couturier Jacques Costet, she showed him some of her own sketches. He was more interested in seeing her walk in one of his dresses, and hired her as a model on the spot.
Much of her appeal lay in her fresh-faced, country-girl looks. Yet no sooner had they begun to get her noticed by magazines than she gave up her job to go and run a bar in Juan-les-Pins with a photographer, Gilbert Graziani.
Advertisement
By the time they came back to Paris to get married, Costet had closed his business. Instead she went to work in 1947 for the couturier Lucien Lelong, though not before Christian Dior (who was then unknown) had asked her to help set up his maison when she got bored. As it was, when she tired of Lelong she was taken on — at five times her previous salary — by the designer who was to make her name, Jacques Fath.
Since he already had a Simone among his house models, he rechristened her Bettina. “Fath was interested in conveying an American spirit and a brand new attitude,” Graziani recalled. “He liked that I was ‘different’: I was very young, very genuine. I wore no make-up and I had red hair.”
Especially after she chopped off her chignon in 1949, replacing it with a boyish crop that started a new trend, Graziani’s image was that of the sleek, chic young Parisienne. As well as Fath’s form-fitting creations, she soon began to wear clothes by the likes of Dior and Balmain on shoots for the major periodicals. Photographs of her by Irving Penn, Norman Parkinson, Horst P Horst and Jean-Philippe Charbonnier still seem to epitomise the period. She was said to be the most photographed woman in France. Even Picasso painted a picture on a shirt for her.
“Fath would throw costume balls in the countryside, at the Château de Corbeville,” she remembered. “All the best buyers, stars, writers, even other designers like Balenciaga and Balmain would come. Sometimes we would throw 1930s-themed parties, or cowboy-themed parties. Imagination was everything.” In 1950, she travelled to the US at the behest of Vogue and joined the Ford model agency.
The next year, she left Fath to help his star pupil Hubert Givenchy to launch his business. She persuaded her model friends, such as Suzy Parker, to appear in his first show, and Givenchy in turn named for her a frilled blouse that became his earliest success. Its shape inspired that of the bottle for his scent Amarige.
Advertisement
Graziani’s marriage had been brief, and by the early 1950s she was the companion of the US screenwriter Peter Viertel, who wrote The African Queen. He had left his pregnant wife for Graziani. After resisting the advances of the photographer Robert Capa, Graziani then lived for a time with Guy Schoeller, an editor who would become the husband of the writer Françoise Sagan. In 1955, however, her path crossed that of Prince Aly Khan — they had first met six years earlier when he had brought Rita Hayworth to Fath to choose her wedding dress.
The two were by now divorced, and the womanising prince was attempting to reform his ways after being passed over for succession as Aga Khan in favour of his own son. Graziani gave up modelling so as to be with him, but in 1960 they were involved in a crash in Paris while on the way to a party. She survived with minor injuries but he was killed, and she miscarried the child she was expecting because of the shock.
Although she received a sizeable bequest, as well as his château at Chantilly (which she later sold to his son), she still had her own way to make. She wrote a memoir, Bettina par Bettina, in 1964, modelled briefly for Coco Chanel, and in the 1970s worked as publicity agent for the designer Emmanuel Ungaro.
Though recently in ailing health, she had remained an inspiration in particular to Azzedine Alaïa, whose Paris gallery staged a retrospective exhibition about her last year.
She said that the business had been smaller in her day. “You could reach out and touch the clothes. It was approachable.” Other things had also changed: “The models are different now,” she thought, “they are so young and they all look the same.”
Advertisement
For her, talent was still indispensable. “I was a success in my job as a cover girl and I owe that success more to an expressive face than to my good looks.”
Bettina Graziani, model, was born on May 8, 1925. She died on March 2, 2015, aged 89