Before there was a supermodel, there was a woman who made being photographed a profession.
Dorian Leigh is the answer to a question most people never think to ask. The question is: when did “model” stop being a word for a girl who stood in dresses at a showroom and start being a word for a job — a career you could have, a name you could build, a face that sold things because the face itself was worth something? The answer, more or less, is 1944. The answer’s name was Dorian.
She was twenty-seven. She had been a Navy engineer during the war — she worked on aircraft at the Bureau of Aeronautics, which is the kind of biographical detail the fashion press routinely left out because it complicated the script. She walked into Harper’s Bazaar looking for a secretarial job, and Diana Vreeland looked at her and said, no, you’re not going to type for us, you’re going to be photographed. This is the story as Dorian later told it. The story is almost certainly edited. The photograph, though, is not edited. You can see it. Vreeland was right.
What Dorian had was a kind of alert, amused, slightly feline adult intelligence in her face that had not previously been in fashion photography. Before her, the models in American fashion magazines were society girls and debutantes and the blank pretty sisters of blank pretty brothers. They were hangers. Dorian was not a hanger. Dorian was someone.
It is worth pausing on that distinction, because in 1944, being photographed for a fashion magazine was not, in any meaningful cultural sense, a career. The American fashion industry in the mid-1940s was beginning its long competition with Paris — a competition sharpened by the German occupation of France, which had temporarily shut down the couture circuit and forced American designers and editors to assert their own primacy. What that competition needed was not just better clothes or better photographers. It needed faces. It needed American faces that could carry American editorial authority. Vreeland, who was in those years working at Harper’s Bazaar before moving to Vogue, understood this. When she looked at Dorian Leigh, she was looking at what an American fashion face could eventually mean.
Before Dorian, the social organization of the modeling job was radically different from what it would become. Models in the late 1930s and early 1940s worked primarily in two registers: the showroom, where they displayed garments to buyers in what was essentially retail theater, and the occasional editorial session, where they posed in silence for slow exposures while the photographer adjusted his lights. Neither role required personality. Neither role particularly rewarded it. The women who did the work were paid per hour or per day, often at rates not much higher than factory wages, with no residuals, no exclusivity, and no legal protection of their image. The fashion industry extracted whatever value it could from them and discarded them when their faces aged or their bodies changed. The idea that the face itself had any independent commercial value — that the woman behind the face might own something that the industry was extracting — did not yet exist as a legal or commercial concept.
Dorian’s career, spanning twenty-one years at the top of the profession, coincided exactly with the period in which all of these conditions began to change. She did not change all of them herself; the changes were the result of many forces, including the postwar economic boom, the rise of the American advertising industry, the growth of television as a media force, and the increasing professionalism of the modeling agency business. But she was the figure at the center of the change, the face that the industry pointed to when it wanted to demonstrate that a model could be a name, that a name could be a brand, that a brand could have a rate.
The Avedon problem
The person who understood this fastest was Richard Avedon. Avedon photographed Dorian more than any other model in his early career — hundreds of times. He said, later, that Dorian was the first model who understood what he was trying to do, which was to photograph a woman as a person and not as a garment-stand. She could move. She could smile in a way that implied she had just said something. She could hold a teacup the way a woman holds a teacup when she is about to tell you a secret. Avedon called her the first great fashion model. He meant: the first model who was a performer and not a mannequin.
This is not empty praise. Avedon, in the late 1940s, was developing the vocabulary that would make him the defining fashion photographer of the twentieth century: motion, expression, context, humor, narrative. The photographs he made with Dorian during this period are the first tests of that vocabulary. They required a collaborator who could give him what he needed before he fully knew what he needed. Dorian gave it. She could move through a shot and give him the decisive moment, the mid-laugh, the turned shoulder, the hand on the glass that looked caught rather than posed. Without those early sessions with Dorian, the Avedon style — as it came to be called — is harder to imagine arriving as quickly or as confidently as it did.
She worked until 1965 — twenty-one years at the top of the profession. She was photographed by Beaton, by Horst, by Penn, by Avedon. She appeared on fifty-eight magazine covers in the six years between 1944 and 1950. She was the face of Revlon’s Fire and Ice campaign in 1952, which is the campaign that invented the idea that lipstick could be a personality test. The campaign text reads like a Cosmo quiz from the future; the photograph of Dorian at its center reads like a movie star. She wasn’t a movie star. She was something new. The language for what she was took about another twenty years to catch up.
Her sister Suzy Parker followed her into the business and became the first model paid $200 an hour. That sounds like a crowning achievement; it’s actually the afterwash of Dorian’s career. Dorian established that the rate could exist. Suzy just claimed it.
What the contract said
The crucial thing to understand about Dorian is that she was the first model to sign an exclusive contract. In 1952, Revlon paid her an annual retainer to appear only in their advertising. This had never happened before. Models had been paid per day, per session, per booking. The concept of a woman whose face belonged, for a year, to a cosmetics company — who was effectively a brand asset — did not exist before Dorian signed her name.
This is the invention. The supermodel era that would follow — Twiggy’s Mary Quant deals, Lauren Hutton’s Ultima II contract, Linda’s red-carpet rate sheet — all of it runs through that 1952 signature. Dorian turned the face into a leaseable good. The money arrived later, but the structure arrived with her.
To see how radical that structure was, consider what modeling looked like institutionally in 1952. The main agencies in New York at the time were the Conover Agency, the Harry Conover agency, and the newly founded and rapidly ascending Ford Models, founded by Eileen and Jerry Ford in 1946. The Fords had done much to professionalize the booking process — they kept cards on their models, placed them with editorial clients on a per-booking basis, and took a commission. But the model was still, fundamentally, a day laborer. She showed up, she worked, she was paid, she left. The idea that her face could be exclusively owned by a single brand for a year, that she could be signed to something that resembled a recording contract or an athlete’s endorsement deal, was new. Revlon, which had been growing aggressively since its founding in 1932, understood the value of exclusivity earlier than most. They also understood what Dorian’s face could do for them better than most of the fashion editors around her did.
She lived a long and complicated life. She had five husbands, a jazz club in France, a perfume line that did not succeed, a tell-all memoir that was described at the time as too frank. She died in 2008. The Times obituary called her, correctly, the first supermodel. Most of the people who had worn the title by then had never heard her name.
The small thing
Look at Avedon’s 1948 photograph of Dorian in a hat. She is laughing. Not smiling — laughing, mid-laugh, caught in it. No one before Dorian had laughed in a fashion photograph. No one. The history of fashion photography up to 1948 was composed faces, closed mouths, considered expressions. Dorian in that hat is photographed with her mouth open and her eyes crinkled, a woman enjoying a joke we cannot hear.
That laugh is a technical achievement as much as it is an emotional one. Avedon would have needed a fast shutter, a good ambient-light setup, and a subject who could be natural mid-laugh without faking the laugh. Dorian could be natural. That is the skill. That is what she brought that nobody before her had: the capacity to be, in the frame of a fashion photograph, a person who was actually doing something, rather than a person who was standing and being looked at.
The joke, of course, is that she had just invented something she would be forgotten for. That’s the joke. She’s laughing because she knows, and because it was funny, and because it was, at the moment, enough.