(5 of 9)
After a stay in Munich or Hamburg, these impregnable Yanks move on, and none too soon, to the softening influences of Milan and Paris. Here the pace of business in photographers' studios seems lackadaisical; great blocks of hours crumble and disappear as assistants putter and the photographer unconcernedly takes his ease. There are still some in the business who have not learned about promptness. Yet business is the wrong word; what is going on in a French or Italian studio is the creation of art, and art must not be hurried. (The French and Italian editions of Vogue are rich, fantastical, lavish to the point of grotesquerie, photographed and laid out by whimsical dreamers.) Hence men like the renowned Paris-based photographer Peter Knapp are horrified by the American custom of paying models by the hour, so that the meter is running whenever she is in the studio. "Today the girls I see just want to make money," Knapp grumbles.
So the pretty students arrive in the Old World, blond by belief and upbringing if not always by hair color, innocent of French and of much else, and invariably, according to the agents who must take care of them, requiring advice about apartments, gynecologists and boyfriends. They learn to distinguish the Seychelles from the Maldives, and they learn about vacation houses in Marrakesh. They learn to eat Thanksgiving turkey stuffed with foie gras, and then, when the gloss they have acquired begins to shine through the lens of a Hasselblad, they fly back to New York, perhaps by now not wearing blue jeans, and have another try at the big tune.
And here, roaring up the fast track at about 420 miles an hour, well out in front, all 16 cylinders firing nicely, is ...
Something's wrong. The observer has been told to meet the international dazzler Clotilde, a model near the very tip of top-top, at a photographer's studio in a loft building above Manhattan's Union Square. He finds the address and introduces himself to the photographer, a small, quiet-mannered Japanese woman named Nana Watanabe. There are two or three other women in the studio from Danskin, a manufacturer known for leotards and tights, for whom Watanabe is shooting a couple of catalogues. And here comes another gofer of some kind, a plain-faced, skinny young woman in big tortoise-shell glasses, a grungy raincoat and sneakers. She plops down at the makeup table, opens a big handbag that turns out to be a makeup case and, as the onlooker tells himself that he is an idiot, briskly begins to turn herself into Clotilde.