Pat Cleveland

Fashion model Pat Cleveland has written an entertaining memoir of her early modeling career. I wanted to read it because I love books about fashion, whether fact or fiction. This claimed to be fact, but was full of eyebrow-raising adventure, eyeball-rolling drama, and heavy duty name-dropping as it described not only Pat's rise to fame as a model, but also the growth of the American fashion industry including the models and designers who became household names. In addition, Pat describes her experiences as a woman of color and her desire to see an African American woman on the cover of Vogue.

Pat's bubbly and genuine personality come through in this never-a-dull-moment chronicle of her life as a young girl (born in 1950) living in glamorous and gritty New York City with her single mother, to her early fashion experiences as a teen in the US, to her European travels with the famous and nearly famous as a young twenty-something, and the memoir concludes in the early 1980's.

During these years, through anecdotes and memories, Pat describes the clothes and shoes she wore, the shows she walked in, and the behind the scenes energy it took to produce the high end designer fashion shows. She explains how she developed her look - with the help of many gay fashion friends, and the encouragement and support she received from her friends in the worlds of fashion, design, and entertainment - Halston, Stephen Burrows, Warren Beatty, Mick Jagger, Muhammad Ali, and many more!

Lots of photos enhance the book, and I was glad to know that Pat is still modeling today.

"Walking Girl" is a term for a runway model, and this book was published with two titles. The version I read is called "Walking with the Muses."… (mer)