Who owns ford modeling agency

Her husband was still That was enough to put down a deposit on an office on Second Avenue between 50th and 51st Streets. There were six telephones on a card table, behind which sat Eileen Ford. She turned around, and I found she was only about three years older than I was. Eileen Ford was equally surprised. She had a mole on her cheekbone, and she made it her trademark, three decades before Cindy Crawford.

Jean knew what she looked like, and she knew how to make herself look even better—though at the beginning she did need to lose some weight. The model herself recalled Eileen putting it more directly. But Jean Patchett was the first that we made into a star. Eileen and Jerry needed capital, and for that Eileen would turn to two of her friends from the North Shore of Long Island, the brothers A.

We were all friends. We would do anything to help each other. We were young. We were all working, and we were having a good time. Powers, Jr. Eileen and Jerry Ford now had the capital to expand their nascent modeling business. In his earliest days on the phone as a model booker, Jerry Ford was delighted to negotiate a plum commission for Jean Patchett—a full two weeks in the Bahamas, travel and all expenses paid, in order to shoot a collection of beach- and leisurewear.

When Patchett got back to New York, however, the voucher for her two-week trip showed only a few hundred dollars. In their two weeks in Nassau, they had been blessed with only a few days of sunshine for shooting. Patchett would have made more money staying in New York doing regular studio work. Canceled work meant canceled checks. Eileen had always cultivated the style of the scrappy shop steward in her protective demeanor toward her girls.

Now Jerry engaged in the same battle for better pay and conditions—in his own, courtlier fashion. He was very polite about it—and he also put in time and a half for overtime, in the event that sessions ran long. But he was different from a shop steward: if the girls were late and held things up, then he would make them pay. The lost time was docked from their fee. My boss had fled. This was the creative essence of the Ford partnership—Eileen had the eye that recruited the quality, and Jerry made sure that people paid properly for it.

You could tell that many of them had never done modeling before. But they always had something special about them—you just yearned to put them in front of the camera. Eileen had a nose for quality. Ford models were seen as the aristocrats of their profession: thighs that stretched for miles; an expectation of blondeness, though not invariably so; and a general impression of extra sparkle, height, and slenderness—stature, in every sense of the word, including mental discipline and punctuality.

I knew who could. She used to give us all Christmas presents—with presents for our children if we had any. That was unheard of. Before the arrival of Eileen and Jerry, there had been a certain hesitation in the media—a cough of apology, almost—when it came to coverage of the glossy, graying gentlemen who headed up the rival agencies.

There was a lingering suspicion of seediness. Yet no one could be suspicious of the Fords with their baby on the floor beside them. Winchell had his own, permanently reserved table, No.

The young Fords were suddenly the toast of Manhattan. They had arrived—and with their new fame there arrived newer and even more stunning models. Dorothy Virginia Margaret Juba grew up an ugly duckling, the daughter of a patrolman in Midtown.

She was the butt of jokes at school as many models relate that they were on account of her skinniness—the result, in her case, of rheumatic fever in the days before antibiotics. Like Joan Pedersen, Dorothy had had to abandon her dreams of being a ballerina because she grew too tall in her teens. Yet Eileen Ford knew exactly what to do with the year-old beanpole when she presented herself at Second Avenue in Eileen sent Dorothy directly to the studio of Irving Penn, who asked for her name.

Sex dehydrated him. After Dorian Leigh closed the Fashion Bureau, not only was she in need of a new agency, but she was eager to advance the career of her much younger sister, Suzy, 15 years her junior. So she phoned Eileen Ford with a proposition, offering to join the Fords immediately and on standard terms, provided that they also sign up her kid sister, Suzy—sight unseen. Rejecting the shorter girls was often a bad mistake I made. By the time Dorian Leigh approached the Fords, her track record had made her a prospect they could not pass up—but what about her unknown sister?

In just a few years, Suzy Parker would become even more famous and successful than her sister Dorian. The happy ending of Funny Face is as predictable as those of The Powers Girl and Cover Girl , two earlier model movies that featured the young ladies of the John Robert Powers and Harry Conover agencies, respectively. Funny Face, starring Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn, aimed higher and came from a different age and sensibility.

The underlying message of Funny Face was the same as the gospel according to Eileen Ford: the face, funny or otherwise, was key to the highly serious creative process of fashion photography, along with discipline and a certain mental attitude. It is not possible to make a precise inventory of the models who worked for Eileen Ford, but surviving records suggest that more than 1, models, male and female, were listed on her books from , when the Ford agency was founded, until its sale, in Good Cop, Bad Cop In the fall of , Eileen set up her card table, address book, and telephone in a house owned by her parents, in Manhattan.

It seems Magnum is now defunct. When Alt Point took over in , it essentially bought out Katie Ford, who had run the company her parents founded since Fashion P. Sign up for WWD news straight to your inbox every day.

All Rights reserved. Fashion Moore From L. Related Galleries. Tags Coronavirus model modeling agencies. Newsletters Sign up for WWD news straight to your inbox every day. Powered by WordPress. My Account Welcome Name. Manage Account. Log Out. To help keep your account secure, please log-in again.