It was Fath who made her famous, renaming her Bettina because he wanted to convey a modern, American spirit and a brand-new attitude in tune with the post-war ideals. ‘He liked that I was different. I was very young, I wore no make-up and I had red hair.’ Being a mannequin was still for ‘couture only’, with no ready-to-wear, but Bettina herself, who had grown up in an impoverished family, was unlike the pre-war, haute-bourgeoise Parisian model, both in looks and in ideals. Bettina’s story illustrates one of the greatest changes in the post-war fashion world – the emergence of the professional model, now viewed as a proper career in its own right. The countesses and princesses of high society were being edged out as muses or icons of fashion. Once she had cut her chignon and wore short cropped hair, Bettina became the most photographed face in France, epitomizing the new, chic young Parisienne, or the embodiment of the freedom-loving, modern woman. After a brief marriage in the late 1940s to the photographer Gilbert Graziani, Bettina had numerous relationships with men, including the photographer Robert Capa, but in 1960 was planning to marry Prince Aly Khan. Pregnant with his child, she and Khan were tragically involved in a car crash which killed him and caused the loss of her unborn child.
There was one other voice raised in mild disapproval of Dior’s opulence: the designer born Carmen de Tommaso who took the name Marie-Louise Carven. Carven, a petite five foot one, was known for her dislike of old-fashioned Parisian sophistication, or what she saw as the Belle Epoque grandeur of heavy silk and corseted cut, favoured by wealthy older women, that had been revived by Christian Dior. Carven had been designing dresses since she was a teenager in the 1920s and, after studying architecture and interior design at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, had courageously opened her own fashion house in the Champs-Elysées in July 1945, immediately the war was over. This was at a time of dramatic fabric shortages throughout Europe, with almost no raw fibres imported or produced, and mills and factories abandoned or destroyed. Couturiers in Paris could mount a show only if they had small caches of pre-war textiles, or if they had access to supplies, as Dior did through Marcel Boussac with his global empire of cotton textile factories and printing plants.
Marie-Louise Carven, by contrast, was ingenious in her search for every scrap of fabric. For her opening show she was able to make a generous-skirted summer dress, created from a roll of striped mint-green and white cotton found in the attic of a chateau and possibly bought before the First World War, intended for maids’ uniforms.* Her dresses were seen as young, fresh and informal in both style and colour, as opposed to the structured gowns of the day which did not flatter small women like her. But more importantly her ideas matched an alternative new mood where fashion became part of everyday living and not just for dressing up to attend a ball. Dior’s New Look grabbed the headlines, but arguably it was Carven, one of the first designers to launch a ready-to-wear or prêt-à-porter range, whose influence was more far-reaching in changing how women dressed.
Fashion and the film industry had always fed on each other and they continued to do so in post-war Paris. Carven’s clothes were in demand from petite stars such as Edith Piaf (who nonetheless insisted on having all the fancy trimmings removed), Leslie Caron, Zizi Jeanmaire and Simone Signoret. Marcel Carné followed his huge success of 1946, the dark thriller Les Portes de la nuit, with a project once again starring Arletty, about children who were jailed in pre-war France under horrific conditions. Mysteriously, the film, called La Fleur de l’age and based on the true story of a mass escape that took place on the island of Belle-Ile-en-Mer and of the child hunt that ensued, was never finished. However, it marked the start of a seventy-year career for one of the child actresses who appeared in it, Anouk Aimée. She acquired her first name, Anouk, from a character she played in that film; Aimée came later. Still just fourteen, that same year she also had a role in Henri Calef’s La Maison sous la mer.
Anouk Aimée was born in Paris as Fran?oise Sorya Dreyfus in April 1932, the daughter of two actors. Her father, Henry Dreyfus, who was Jewish, worked under the stage name Henry Murray, and her mother, Geneviève Sorya, was Catholic. Little is known of the family’s Jewish background (they may have been related to Captain Alfred Dreyfus), nor of how they survived during the war, but according to one story Fran?oise was walking home from school one day in occupied Paris when her classmates shouted out, ‘Here’s a little Jewish girl for you,’ just as German soldiers came by. Fortunately, a ‘good’ German soldier took pity on her, told her to take off her star and brought her home to her grandmother. She then moved south with her mother, was baptized a Catholic and attended boarding school in Bandol.