Jean Shrimpton and David Bailey: The week that changed the Fashion World forever: New York 1962

I am always intrigued by events that totally change or altar history.  In 1962, no one had yet heard of the Beatles, and there was no such thing as youth fashion. But then David Bailey and Jean Shrimpton went to New York and everything changed. In that one week in January of 1962 the duo threw the Fashion World upside down with the photos, nee art, they created.  Shrimpton not only became the symbol of Swinging London,  but of the decade as a whole, the swinging 60's.

Bailey and Shrimpton first worked together in 1960 at Brides, a testing ground for Vogue photographers. They hit it off and from then on he fought for her. He nearly jeopardised a big chance at Vogue - 14 pages of celebrity-led fashion for September 1961 - by insisting on Shrimpton as model. Fashion editor Lady Clare Rendlesham, equally stubborn and alarmingly forbidding, refused. Bailey dug in further. In the end, Rendlesham gave in. "I was intent on delivering the goods," Shrimpton said. "I wanted to prove Lady Rendlesham wrong." The sitting made Bailey's name and a trip to New York was penciled in for January - with Rendlesham as editor and chaperone.

"I wanted Jean," Bailey says. "She was just about everything to me then. I put everything of me into her. She was my total muse - I didn't want to look  at another model. There was a sort of magic there. She had a democratic kind of beauty, one that no one could possibly object to.  Everyone loved Jean."

The pair were enthralled by New Yok City, the riotous circus of its streets and the lunatic display of everyday Manhattan life. They ran circles around Rendlesham, whose brief was to show mid-priced British fashion against the city's sweeping panorama. But Bailey had his own agenda: to bring to fashion photography the spontaneity of street reportage. Instead of the Statue of Liberty and soaring, modernist architecture, he turned inwards and down. He raked his lens over Shrimpton in phone booths on Broadway, in shooting galleries off Times Square and outside the pagoda-fronted restaurants of Chinatown. A lack of professional polish - hair, make-up, assistant - gave the pictures a rawness so far denied him at British Vogue. This compensated for more immediate vagaries: "It was so cold," Bailey said, "the cameras stuck to your fingers," adding, "An adventure? Not really. Clare Rendlesham was crying all the time and Jean was very, very cold. Physically shivering and her eyes watering. The clothes were dreadful. I didn't think Vogue would like what Jean and I were doing. They didn't like much of what I did anyway. I didn't care. I just did what I did. But it worked."

Afterwards Shrimpton would widely be reported as the “world’s highest paid model,” the “most famous model” and the “most photographed in the world.” She was also described as having the “world’s most beautiful face” and as “the most beautiful girl in the world.”

Of Shrimpton, Bailey remarked, “She was magic. In a way she was the cheapest model in the world — you only needed to shoot half a roll of film and you had it.”





I tried to include as many photos of that fateful shoot as I could find, beginning with photos Shrimpton had taken with Brian Duffy in 1960 when Shrimpton was still unknown.




"Instinct is the elusive magic that happens when art collides with genius."

Even if it happens in just one week.