D’Aillencourt, Simone (1930 - 2017) “She would have been so proud to be part of this project.” It feels like I’m forever arriving too late. I spent much of the early part of this project researching & interviewing people involved in New York’s fashion scene in the Forties — only to find, when I caught up to Barbara Mullen’s second life in Fifties Paris, that I’d missed out so narrowly on many of her European contemporaries, from Bettina to Elsa Martinelli to Bronwen Pugh. Simone D’Aillencourt should have been the first I’d have tried to track down. Discovered on a trip to London in her mid-twenties, D’Aillencourt ricocheted to the top of her profession, and found success in America just as Mullen was settling into life as a top Paris model. Albert Seeberger, part of the second generation of the Seeberger Frères, proclaimed her their favourite model of all time; for Jeanloup Sieff, she was to the Fifties what Jean Shrimpton would be to the Sixties — ‘the most perfect example of that symbiosis of a personality and a period.’ She soared above the Seine in a glass bubble for Melvin Sokolsky, braved the streets of Rome with William Klein, took tea on Savile Row with Frank Horvat, and raced round Cape Canaveral with Dick Avedon. Although she was only an occasional runway model, she pioneered the ‘geste de Simone’, to deal with Cardin’s unwieldy stoles — a pose that saw the stole slung low from the shoulders, and looped through the right arm (to be teamed, one reported noted, with a ‘gentle, mocking smile’) And she made up for the late start to her career by continuing right to the end of the Sixties, signing off with a spectacular Henry Clarke shoot in India. Even by the standards of the day, there are few interviews with D’Aillencourt; just a fifteen-year run of extraordinary photographs, before she retired and became a successful model agency owner. She died a year before I finally stumbled across her daughter’s contact details. And by then all we could do was have another brief, regretful email exchange. Too late, again. by John-Michael O'Sullivan
