The Queen

Mini-Bio Series, Models, Social Media Content

Photo: Henry Clarke

Bettina Graziani’s name was actually Simone, but when she went to work for Jacques Fath, he already had a model named Simone, so he changed her name to Bettina. Soon, it was ‘Queen Bettina’.

In 1945, following an impoverished childhood, Graziani had moved to Paris with the hope of becoming a fashion designer, and landed an interview with designer Jacques Costet.  She had flaming red hair and her face was covered with freckles, but Costet saw the innate elegance, flashing doe eyes and dramatic mouth, and hired her as a model. He introduced her to Fath, a brilliant but famously disorganized designer, for whom Graziani would do much more than model. As Life Magazine reported at the time, “She beat the publicity drums, pulled in all the important U.S. fashion editors, posed for pictures, set up seats, pressed clothes backstage, modeled them on the runway and came out afterward to sell them.”

She then became the muse of Hubert de Givenchy who, in 1952, created the ‘Bettina Blouse’, and the Amarige perfume bottle, “in her likeness”. By then, she had an exclusive contract with Vogue and had shot to the top of the modeling world, sharing the title of ‘world’s first supermodel’ with Barbara Goalen and Lisa Fonssagrives. She became the icon of the modern post-war woman, and the most photographed woman in France. During the ‘40s and ‘50s, she was the undisputed queen of Parisian couture, earning, in today’s equivalent, $2,000 an hour.

Her last fashion show was in 1967, at age 42, where Coco Chanel suggested that she “lose a little weight” by not eating on week-ends. She moved on, but stayed in fashion, handling publicity for Valentino and Emanuel Ungaro. In 2010, she was presented with the Ordre des Arts des Lettres; in an interview afterward, she noted that “All models today look the same. But there’s no secret to it—you don’t need to be beautiful; you need to have personality.”