For an insight into what fashion modelling in the US was like before Eileen Ford and her husband, Jerry, set up their revolutionary model agency, watch the 1944 film musical Cover Girl, in which a new face is found through an open casting call and nobody ever mentions fees, contracts, working hours or practices. The movie takes for granted that photographic modelling is what the young and beautiful do because they are selling some other performing talent, or because they are wealthy and it's a fun way not to waste youth's brief loveliness.
Eileen, who has died aged 92, married Jerry, and began the lifetime business partnership that changed that world for ever, in the very year the film was premiered. Their story would have made a swell movie too. Eileen had modelled while studying psychology at Barnard College, New York; she met Jerry, a wartime sailor, in a drugstore and they eloped to San Francisco before he left for the Pacific. Back in New York, she worked as a photographer's assistant, stylist and fashion trade reporter, booking her modelling friends.
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