Dorothea Towles

Dorothea Towles grew up in Texas and moved to Los Angeles as a young woman, where she began modelling in a period when American fashion houses almost universally refused to hire Black models. Frustrated by the closed doors at home, she travelled to Paris in 1949, a city where she believed her talent might finally be judged on its own merits.

Towles's instincts proved correct. Within a short time of arriving in Paris, she was modelling for the era's most prestigious couture houses, including Christian Dior, Elsa Schiaparelli, Pierre Balmain and Jacques Fath — an almost unimaginable feat for a Black American woman in the fashion capital of the world at that time.

She became the first Black American model to work regularly in Parisian haute couture, walking the runway for designers whose houses had never before featured a Black model, and her success in Europe drew press attention back in the United States, where the fashion industry remained years behind in its own willingness to hire Black talent.

Towles used her earnings and visibility to organise touring fashion shows across the United States that showcased Black models to Black audiences, deliberately creating the opportunities the mainstream American industry continued to deny. She later returned to Los Angeles, where she remained a respected figure in fashion until her death in 2006.