Simone Micheline Bodin

Simone Micheline Bodin (1925—), known professionally as Bettina or Bettina Graziani, was a French fashion model of the 1940s and 1950s and an early muse to the fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy. She also has been a designer of knitwear and, later, a poet and composer.

Biography

Born in France in 1925, Simone Micheline Bodin was described as "a freckle-faced rail worker's daughter from Brittany" before becoming a model. She was renamed and recreated by Jacques Fath, who told her, "We already have a Simone; you look to me like a Bettina." Bodin was invited by Christian Dior to join his fashion house which she refused, choosing instead to work for Fath.

Bodin became one of the century's first supermodels, rivalled in the Forties only by the "English beauty" Barbara Goalen. She was associated with Pierre Balmain, Lucien Lelong, Jacques Fath, and Christian Dior, but most importantly with Givenchy, for whom she worked as a model and press agent. Hubert de Givenchy named his first collection, which debuted in 1952, after her; one of its designs, the Byronesque "Bettina" blouse, became a fashion icon in the early 1950s and inspired the bottle for the best-selling Givenchy parfum "Amarige."

After a short marriage to Gilbert "Benno" Graziani, a French photographer and reporter, she became the companion of Peter Viertel, the American screenwriter. Later she was the fiancée of Prince Aly Khan, a playboy who briefly was the United Nations ambassador from Pakistan.

She retired from modeling in 1955, after meeting Aly Khan. In 1960, Bettina, then pregnant with their child, survived the car accident that took the life of the prince; the shock of the accident would later result in a miscarriage. After Aly Khan's death, Bettina wrote her memoir, Bettina par Bettina (Paris: Flammarion, 1964).

Autobiography

• Bettina by Bettina, London: Michael Joseph, 1965.