Jean Shrimpton and David Bailey: The week that changed the Fashion World forever: New York 1962

I am always intrigued by events that totally change or altar history. In 1962, no one had yet heard of the Beatles, and there was no such thing as youth fashion. But then David Bailey and Jean Shrimpton went to New York and everything changed. In that one week in January of 1962 the duo threw the Fashion World upside down with the photos, nee art, they created. Shrimpton not only became the symbol of Swinging London, but of the decade as a whole, the swinging 60's. Bailey and Shrimpton first worked together in 1960 at Brides, a testing ground for Vogue photographers. They hit it off and from then on he fought for her. He nearly jeopardised a big chance at Vogue - 14 pages of celebrity-led fashion for September 1961 - by insisting on Shrimpton as model. Fashion editor Lady Clare Rendlesham, equally stubborn and alarmingly forbidding, refused. Bailey dug in further. In the end, Rendlesham gave in. "I was intent on delivering the goods," Shrimpton said. "I wanted to prove Lady Rendlesham wrong." The sitting made Bailey&name and a trip to New York was penciled in for January - with Rendlesham as editor and chaperone. "I wanted Jean," Bailey says. "She was just about everything to me then. I put everything of me into her. She was my total muse - I didn&want to look at another model. There was a sort of magic there. She had a democratic kind of beauty, one that no one could possibly object to. Everyone loved Jean." The pair were enthralled by New Yok City, the riotous...