Dovima: The Spirituality of Fashion

She was both eternal and fleeting.

Dovima was a fashion model active in the 1950s. With her cool smile amid the glamour of haute couture, she was sometimes compared to the Mona Lisa and Nefertiti.

Her almost timeless presence took the industry by storm, and at a time when top models were paid $25 an hour, she was earning $60 an hour, a truly extraordinary feat.

Dovima, whose real name was Dorothy Virginia Margaret Juba, was born in New York.

As a child, he suffered from rheumatism and was confined to his home.

She was a girl who liked to draw to kill time, and she always signed her drawings with DOVIMA, an anagram of her own name.

She was scouted by a Vogue editor while walking down the street and her modeling career began.

When asked to smile for the first time during a test shoot, Dorothy closed her mouth and smiled modestly to hide her missing teeth. Her enigmatic appearance was exactly the kind of beauty the times demanded.

She has clear features and pale skin. A long, slender neck. Her shoulders are slightly sloping, and her thin frame is supported by supple limbs. And the gaze she directs into the lens (like Marilyn, she has a slight exotropia) is very melancholic.

If you look at the sketches for Yves Saint Laurent's debut collection in 1958, you can see traces of Dovima. She was the epitome of 1950s fashion.

Like an ancient queen or a lady with an eternal smile, Dovima stands aloof, exuding the scent of grace and death.

Despite her appearance, her personal life was chaotic: most of her relationships with men were troubled, and she herself was increasingly plagued by problems with spending, violence, and alcohol.

In that sense, she could be called a supermodel before supermodels.

And just as her problems were getting worse, so too were trends.

In the Swinging Sixties, an age of youth and rebellion, a muse had to be lively and rebellious. Compared to Twiggy and Bardot, Dovima's presence was now merely gloomy.

Her own sensibilities, which had propelled her to the status of a top model in such a short space of time, also sensed the changes of the times.

In 1959, after finishing the cover shoot for Harper's Bazaar's December issue,

"This is the last shoot."

With that, she ended her modeling career.

And then she was forgotten. She lived a quiet life, changing jobs frequently, until she died in May 1990.

At the time, she was working as a waitress at a pizza place and had very little cash on hand.

Dovima, with her majesty, represented a time when fashion was more sacred. Ephemeral and eternal. A high priestess of fashion, a contradiction in her very being. The revelations of her gaze remain as sharp as ever.