Retro Bio: My Own Story: The Truth About Modelling

"I don't envy her successor. She will have to be exceptionally gifted. For a girl of Shrimp's calibre is born only once in a decade. Her success is not due to a trick of the face that she has acquired, or a piece of cleverness. Her tutors have not so much taught her an art as brushed away the artificialties and self-consciousness which mask so many English beauties, and underneath found diamond. Beneath the county chick Shrimp is a natural, and this is a rare species." -- Romany Bain, "The Truth About Jean Shrimpton," in My Own Story

a"href="http://www.swinginchicks.com/jean_shrimp...">Jean Shrimpton, a top English photographic model in the early 1960s, describes her rapid rise, the day-to-day work of modeling, and for those with the perfect weight and bone structure, how to become a clothes hanger.

As Romany Bain writes in the introduction, "The Shrimp"'s photographer David Bailey played her Svengali, guiding her to express "the mood of clothes" on film. Many of his black and white photos of Shrimpton appear throughout, displaying an amazingly wide range of expressions and styles.

Shrimpton hadn't planned to become a model. When she was a secretarial school student, director Cy Endfield (who later directed Zulu [1964]) spotted her eating lunch in Hyde Park and considered using her in one of his films. Soon after, a photographer walked up to her and commented that she should try modeling. She entered one of the most prestigious modeling schools, the Lucie Clayton Model School, which offered among other subjects, classes on make-up, grooming, and how to walk like a model.

After completing the course, she hoped to become a photographic model. Luckily for her she blossomed before the camera, otherwise she might have been religated to live modeling in stores. She walks through the physical and emotional requirements for modeling. She also covers photographic modeling, TV modeling, and haute couture house work. She stresses that despite the common notion that models spend most of their days posing for a few photos a day, modeling is hard work. Models, especially photographic models, need a strong stomach to deal with extreme weather and the often long hours. They should also wear a shield of confidence against the inevitable rejections.

At the time her book had gone to press, the then 21-year-old Shrimpton had completed nearly all her career goals, including working with famed fashion photographer Richard Avedon. It was unusual for a face to reign as long as hers had; only a few years later fellow country-woman Twiggy became her successor.

Shrimpton capably dispels the common stereotypes associated with modeling. She does a fair job at reporting,

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