By the end of her tenure she was making a staggering $7,500 a year working part-time, and had received three marriage proposals from her French admirers, one of whom kissed her feet and murmured, “I worship the ground you walk on, mademoiselle.” BLACK MODEL BEHAVIOURĪfter Paris, Williams returned to America, where things had not changed for dark-skinned African American models. She modelled in the famous ateliers of fashion designers Christian Dior and Jean Dessès. “Over there I was ‘La Belle Americaine,’” she said proudly.
The French, by contrast, held a very different view of black beauty, and by 1960 Williams had moved to Paris.
“I was too dark to be accepted,” Williams recalled. These early years were tough, as not only did beauty’s apartheid system exclude all non-white models from mainstream fashion, but within the African American modelling scene itself, the girls were required to be light-skinned, just like the African American chorus girls of the 1920s. With her trademark bouffant wig, sculpted eyebrows and long, giraffe-like neck, Williams worked exclusively for African American magazines such as Ebony and Jet. Struck by her beauty, they urged her to take up fashion modelling. While there she was spotted on separate occasions by Lena Horne and Sammy Davis Jr, who happened to be in the studio doing press shots. As a teenager she studied dance, drama and art before getting a job as a stylist at a New York photography studio. Born in East Riverton, New Jersey in 1937, she was obsessed with clothes from an early age, and began sewing her own garments at the age of seven. In 1950s America Helen Williams became the first black female fashion model to do just that. THERE WERE OTHERS before her, but none that crossed over into the mainstream.
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