Dorothea Church

Dorothea Towles in Paris, from 1949 The starting point for Black models in European couture. Towles went to Paris in 1949, where Christian Dior hired her to stand in for one of his regular models, and she spent about five years in France modeling for houses including Jacques Fath, Elsa Schiaparelli and Pierre Balmain. She is often cited as the first Black model to work with the top French designers, a claim best read as "first widely recorded," since earlier names may simply be lost.