The French model Bettina Graziani was known in her heyday as “the most photographed woman in France.” She was one of the world’s first supermodels and gained worldwide fame during the 1940s and 1950s. She posed for fashion luminaries like Hubert de Givenchy, Christian Dior, Coco Chanel, and Valentino. Bettina defined postwar Parisian glamour and later switched her career to poetry and composing.
Modeling career
Bettina was born in 1925 as Simone Micheline Bodin in Normandy. Her mother was a schoolteacher who raised her. After the city was liberated from the German occupation in 1944, she moved to Paris. In 1945, she met designer Jacques Costet in hopes of securing a job in fashion design. He decided to hire her as a model since her skills as a mannequin were better than those necessary for a designer. As a young woman in Paris, Bettina hoped to become a designer but instead worked as a muse and model, first with Jacques Fath, who christened her “Bettina” because Fath already had a Simone among his models. Her look represented the wasp-waisted, cigarette-smoking, haute-couture sophisticate of the 1950s. She had a piquant face crowned by a ring of red hair, a tiny hourglass figure with a hand-span waist, and a look that suggested either quizzical surprise or wry amusement. She ruled as the undisputed queen of the Parisian couture.
Eileen Ford, Bettina’s modeling agency owner, landed her a deal with Vogue immediately upon her arrival in New York in 1950; she posed exclusively for the magazine within a week. In 1952, Bettina helped launch Givenchy’s first design house as publicity director, a former assistant of Fath. She was one of the highest-paid models of her era. She posed for many leading 20th-century photographers, including Irving Penn, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gordon Parks, Horst P. Horst, and Erwin Blumenfeld.
Personal life
Bettina married Photographer Gilbert Graziani while working as a model, but the marriage ended after a short time. After the divorce, she started a relationship with screenwriter Peter Viertel, who abandoned his then-pregnant wife for her. She also dated Peter Viertel, the author and screenwriter of such movies as The African Queen and The Sun Also Rises.
In 1955, she left modeling after meeting Prince Aly Kahn and retired shortly afterward. As they were headed to a party in 1960, his fiancée was beside him when they had a fatal car accident outside Paris. Bettina sustained only minor cuts to her forehead while Kahn died soon after at the Foch hospital. While she was pregnant at the time, she miscarried after being stressed out by accident. After Khan’s death, Bettina wrote the autobiography Bettina par, Bettina. She died at age 89 in 2015.
Below are some glamorous photos of Bettina Graziani from her modeling career.
