Photographs of Carmen Dell’Orefice’s sixty-six-year career as a supermodel, by celebrated artists like Cecil Beaton and Irving Penn, cross the bridge between fashion photography and art

The small but exquisite exhibition of Carmen Dell’Orefice’s sixty-six-year career as a supermodel is a tasty appetizer for the Christmas season. Photographs of the model, by celebrated artists like Cecil Beaton and Irving Penn, cross the bridge between fashion photography and art – a gap that is constantly challenged by publications like Vogue and i-D.

In Penn’s “Girl with Fruit, Shoe and Butterflies,” shot for Vogue in 1946, Dell’Orefice sits casually surrounded by half a melon and a black leather pump. Butterflies flit around her, one sits on her shoulder, another on her shoe. Her bow-shaped mouth seems to say that the butterflies are lucky to be sitting on her, just for a moment. Her look, as in many of her pictures, is caught between wide-eyed ingénue and all-knowing femme fatale. And it is impossible to know if Dell’Orefice has just served tea and croquettes to the local chapter of the Women’s Institute, or butchered the latest in a long line of hapless victims in her basement.

Born on Welfare Island, New York, in 1931, to an Italian violinist and a Hungarian dancer, Dell’Orefice was training to be a ballet dancer at the Swoboda School when she developed rheumatic fever at the age of thirteen. Her career as a dancer may still have flourished if she hadn’t grown three inches in height during her illness. Not long after, with dreams of tutus and pointe shoes a thing of yesterday, Dell’Orefice was modelling for Vogue at the rate of $7.50 an hour. During this period of her life, Beaton, Penn and Horst P Horst all had the chance to caress her timeless beauty with their lens, and she was considered the toast of the season – well, of many seasons maybe.

By the late 1940s, she was considered too underweight and anaemic to be glamorous. A timely visit to Condé Nast’s in-house doctor, however, pulled a miracle transformation out of the bag, and all of a sudden, Dell’Orefice glowed with health and vitality, and suddenly sprouted an overflowing bosom. This led, inevitably, to a flash career as a lingerie model at Vanity Fair and an asking price of $300 an hour.

Several decades, three husbands, a multitude of photoshoots and advertisements, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Arts London later, snowy-haired Dell’Orefice laughs in your face in a series of photographs by Ali Mahdavi, recently commissioned by the London College of Fashion. As Norman Parkinson once said of the fashion camera’s favourite muse, she “didn’t look bad for an old bag.”

Carmen: A Life in Fashion
London College of Fashion, John Princes Street
Till January 28, 2012
www.fashionspacegallery.com