The haughty, thoroughbred stereotype of the modelling world in the Forties and Fifties is best exemplified by Dorian Leigh. At 5ft 5in, the 6st 11lb beauty with Persian blue eyes, beguiling zigzag eyebrows and hourglass figure, embodied the appeal of the screen starlet.

As a fellow model, Carmen dell'Orefice, put it: “Leigh had sizzling sex appeal ... pure oestrogen” - which helps to explain why, by 1950, she had featured on seven covers for Vogue and 50 for other international magazines.

Models in the Forties and Fifties were favoured for their aristocratic air. Anyone trawling through archives from that era will find a bewildering number of references to “cool, fragile beauties” in possession of an untouchable allure.

Despite the patrician aloofness captured in images by Horst, Beaton and Avedon, these were generally women from working-class backgrounds, for modelling was not the reputable - or regulated - industry of today. Leigh instinctively knew what a photographer wanted and, according to Eileen Ford, head of the Ford Models agency, “came alive just at the moment the shutter clicked”.

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Unlike the models of today, Leigh retained her mystery. There was no being photographed falling out of nightclubs and models were not known by first names.

Leigh began her career at 27, late by today's standards, although Diana Vreeland, the legendary Harper's Bazaar Editor, advised Leigh to lie and say that she was 17. She was aided by the vogue for looking more grown up and sophisticated: Leigh would never have needed to look like a 19-year-old ingénue. Teen fashion was yet to be invented and as dell'Orefice explained: “Everyone wanted to look aristocratic, whereas nowadays they just want to look sexy and available.”

She was also a long way from the Amazonian ideal of the 1980s but in the day when fashion was a luxury for a tiny elite and when Dior's New Look, created for tiny waists and slender frames, was taking off, Leigh took New York by storm.

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