The Bones Have Names

The high-fashion model is a slave to the camera, a good set of bones to the photographer, another 10% to the agent, a size 8-10 to the designer and, to herself, landlord over priceless property. She is undernourished (a pallid cheek is a cosmetic's best background), underweight (at an average height of 5 ft. 8 in., she weighs an average 112 Ibs., so that flesh does not detract from fabric cut), and overpaid (no less than $25 an hour, as much as $120). Her working life is short--at 30 she may drop overnight from a cover on Vogue to a back page in a mail-order catalogue. Few of her breed are known by name except in the fashion world they rule and serve, and most of those so blessed (Grace Kelly, Suzy Parker, Jane Fonda and, this year, Pamela Tiffin) are quick to grab their identity and take it to Hollywood to see it in neon.

Dismissed by men as "brittle," revered by women who revere desserts more, today's model is as much as and no more than her well-disciplined face and body; she is another accessory to the dress she displays, as silent and secondary as the shoes and gloves. If the dress does not fit, the model is made to conform (hairspray cans are tucked in the backs of loose waistlines to take up the slack; tissue paper is stuffed into brassieres to fill out bust lines).

The wheel of fashion, as it does for the clothes displayed, turns also for models, though more slowly. The cool all-American beauties (Sunny Harnett, Jean Patchett, Betsy Pickering) of the '50s are still around; but today a new set of faces dominates the glossy pages of the fashion magazines. Curiously enough, most of the new crop came to New York from Germany, France, China and Italy (many of today's top models speak as many as three languages), and in the space of less than two years have risen to command a field until now considered almost a closed U.S. shop. Ironically, the new model is also softer and less alarmingly dramatic, thus making it easier for the ordinary U.S. woman reader to visualize herself (if only she could lose 20 Ibs.) wearing those svelte creations of haute couture.

Some leaders of the new wave: sbDOLORES WETTACH is lush, Lorenesque, and doubly foreign (her father is Swiss, her mother Swedish); she moved at the age of five from Switzerland to Flushing, N.Y., where her father set up a mink ranch. Now about 24 ("You learn not to be too exact"), Dolores was elected Miss Vermont in the 1956 Miss Universe contest, graduated in 1957 from the University of Vermont with a B.S. in nursing. While she was working as a nurse at Manhattan's Doctors Hospital, a sharp-eyed photographer saw beyond her heavy oxfords, asked her to pose. Part of Dolores' sudden rise to the" top was her resemblance to Jackie Kennedy. Now she makes $50 an hour ($10 less than most top models, a difference that will probably vanish with her first big cover), is called by Photographer Milton Greene "the newest, most dewy-eyed model this year," has blue eyes, brown hair and too much figure. "I'm made to wear a flattening bra," she sighs. "Otherwise, I take away from the dress."

sbMAROLA WITT, brown-haired, brown-eyed and just 19, was born in Berlin (real name: Wittenstein), left Germany five years ago. In her senior year at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Greenwich, Conn., Marola went to the Viennese Opera Ball at the Waldorf-Astoria, was spotted by a Glamour editor. Marola soon dropped her plans to be a painter, now makes $60 an hour, has appeared on the covers of Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Mademoiselle and Glamour. Since her mother and architect stepfather live in Hamburg, Marola shares a Greenwich Village apartment with another girl, professedly yearns to get married and live in California, where "you can breathe and see sky."

sbISABELLA ALBONICO, Italian by temperament as well as birth (24 years ago, in Florence), began modeling in Europe when she was 15, arrived in New York four years ago. Brown-haired and brown-eyed, she has had covers on Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and LIFE, makes $60 an hour, and has won, she says, "a reputation for being allergic to being pummeled around under the lights. Nobody touches me." She "would like most of all to be a movie star," has just returned from Hollywood, where she played a small part ("but opposite Gary Grant") in A Touch of Mink and a larger one in an all-Italian film, Smog. Besides English and Italian, Isabella speaks French and Spanish, hates big groups ("At the end of an evening in New York, everybody's lost; nobody knows anybody else").

sbDOROTHEA MCGOWAN is the exception in the new crop: she speaks only English and was bom in Brooklyn. Her pre-modeling life took her as far from home as Staten Island, where she finished her freshman year at Notre Dame College before taking a summer job modeling $2.98 house dresses. A few months later, her first photographic try at a cover made Vogue; this year she set some kind of a record by appearing on four Vogue covers in a row (nobody but her mother or agent could have told that it was the same girl). Twenty-year-old Dorothea ("My middle initial is E, and Dorothy sounded so ordinary") makes $60 an hour, has her own apartment in New York, studies French at Manhattan's French Institute twice a week ("so that when my dream of living in Paris comes true, I'll be ready for it"). In the relentless search of fashion editors for bizarre backdrops, Dorothea has been sent, all expenses paid, to be photographed in front of the great architectural monuments of Europe, among Middle East bazaars and under Caribbean palms, is absolutely "infatuated with the idea of being paid to travel."

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