An unexpected ally has spoken out in sympathy for fashion’s sleeping beauty Cara Delevingne, who came under fire this week for allegedly drifting off during photoshoots and interviews. Sandra Howard, former magazine cover star and wife of the ex-Conservative leader Michael Howard, has jumped to the defence of her modern counterparts.
“It is much harder to be a model nowadays,” says Howard, who is about to launch her fifth novel, Tell the Girl, about the glamorous modelling world of Sixties New York. “Nobody cared if you turned up five minutes late to a shoot. There was no social media. We were so much more free.”
Howard’s book borrows from her own younger days in Manhattan, posing for Cecil Beaton and modelling for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. “When I was working in NYC it was very Mad Men,” she told The Londoner. “The advertising executives didn’t look like Don Draper but they certainly acted like him. The whole attitude towards women was completely different. If you were booked to go away on a trip with a certain advertising executive you would definitely have to think twice about it.”
Howard would retreat to the comfort of the British Embassy in Washington, where she formed a strong friendship with the Kennedys. “I was with them on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis,” she recalls. “I wish I had been there at the age I am now so I could appreciate it.” For all Howard’s protestations, it seems that she may have had as exciting a career as the one Ms Delevingne is slumbering through now.
