David Downton and Carmen Dell’Orefice met in London in 2003, when Dell’Orefice was enlisted to walk in the Hardy Amies show under its new creative director, Ian Garlant.

Garlant was a protégé of Sir Hardy Amies, the Queen’s dressmaker, and he believed that “a beautiful dress and a beautiful woman are timeless.”

In 2011, the friends celebrated Downton’s appointment as Claridge’s artist in residence with a glass of champagne.

When Downton delivered the Halls Extra Strong throat lozenges that she’d asked him to bring from England, her eyes lit up. “You’re an actor!” she said. “No one ever does what they say they’re going to do. From now on you have me in your hip pocket.”

At the St. Regis hotel in New York in 2013, when Downton was illustrating Dell’Orefice for a feature in *Vanity Fair.*

When Downton sketched Dell’Orefice at her Park Avenue apartment, in 2000, she arranged her hair into its trademark style “to give you something to draw.”

At a 2007 sitting at the Gramercy Park Hotel, Dell’Orefice wore a black suit with a white ruffle designed by her friend Jackie Rogers. She fashioned it into a dozen or more shapes.

At the Dior atelier in Paris in 2000, during a fitting for John Galliano’s couture show.

Sitting at the Hôtel Westminster in Paris, in 2017, Dell’Orefice had just finished a turn on the runway of her friend, the Chinese couturier Guo Pei.

A much-discussed Stephen Jones hat at the Dior couture fitting.

At the Hôtel Westminster in 2017, Dell’Orefice realized that it had been 70 years since she first appeared on the cover of *Vogue.*

“Fashion illustration never goes away, you know,” Dell’Orefice tells Downton. “It keeps coming back. Like a melody.”

When David Met Carmen

An alluring new book explores the relationship between two fashion luminaries

Portraits by David Downton

According to David Downton, Carmen Dell’Orefice is “the sine qua non of beauty, but that’s just her opening play.” The illustrator first discovered this model and muse in the late 90s, when he saw David Bailey’s documentary Models Close Up. He quickly arranged a meeting through Dell’Orefice’s agency, Ford Models, and has been drawing her with gusto and ardor ever since—mostly in London and New York, around the time of the couture shows, but occasionally even on-camera for the BBC.

Now, in his new book, Drawing Carmen, Downton draws this fashion luminary in even greater detail. It is rich with anecdotes about her work ethic—“If you provide reliable door-to-door transport and shoes that fit, you will have her undying gratitude,” he writes—and her Dalís, which were given as a form of payment when she modeled for the artist back in the 40s.

In addition to the illustrations, Downton’s interviews provide fresh insights into a character who counts her ability to remain “anonymous” as one of her greatest achievements. “My dear, I have a doctorate in self-isolation, I have lived alone so long,” she says. “I am most gratefully following Buddha’s directive ‘Don’t just do something, sit there.’” —Ashley Baker