The New Yorker, February 13, 1995 P. 70
SHOWCASE about America's first internationally famous model, Suzy Parker. Four pages of photographs of Parker (all taken by Richard Avedon) accompany article. Parker became famous at the start of the Cold War. With her trademark russet hair, cygnet's neck, and just-this-side-of-melancholy smile, Parker portrayed a new kind of fashionable American woman: active and reflective, the girl most likely to be named homecoming queen--only to renounce the crown. "Use your mind!" Parker's father demanded at the beginning of her career, in 1948. And it was her mind, its process of intellection, that Parker revealed to the camera, along with a "look" that was like no other woman's on earth. Parker's spirit, her quicksilver wit and to-hell-with-it imagination, is the inspiration for designers like John Galleon in fashion's current cool fifties revival--her easy American style, the sartorial manifestation of her spirit. Like most stars, Parker worked in collaboration with a powerful director--Richard Avedon. "There were great models before and after Suzy," Avedon says, "but she was something else--a red-headed force of nature, a wolf in chic clothing, the one flesh-and-blood woman in a world of exquisite creatures." And, like most of the great actor-director teams of the fifties and sixties, Parker and Avedon defined their epoch. Pictured in the brave new world they invented was everything a red-blooded American girl should have: Coca-Cola, a Dior, time for reflection. Parker does not have a speaking role in the opening sequence of "Funny Face." But we see in her eyes the woman she wanted to be and eventually became: wife of the actor Bradford Dillman and mother if six, content to let Suzy Parker, model and legend, go her own way.
