Helen Marie Williams was born in Burlington County, New Jersey, on September 16, 1935, and grew up in East Riverton, a small city on the Delaware River about 15 miles northeast of Philadelphia. Her father, Ellis L. Williams, was a driver; her mom, Helen (Blackstone) Williams, was a homemaker.
After highschool, Helen discovered work as an assistant at Pagano Studios, a industrial pictures studio in Manhattan for catalogs and promoting firms. Burt PaganoThe proprietor additionally makes a speciality of kids’s pictures. Ms. Williams ultimately labored there as a stylist and sometimes employed fashions. Ms Dutton recalled being employed to shoot the catalog, carrying her typical uniform of slacks and no make-up.
“This isn’t the look of the band and Helen disagrees with it,” Ms Dutton mentioned. “She comes from the period of gloves, matching purses and hoses, and also you’d have an additional pair in your bag in case you have been working.”
Ms. Williams had a quick, early marriage to John Clayton Anderson. In 1977, she married males’s clothes salesman Norman Jackson. He died in 2017.
After Ms. Williams retired from modeling within the Seventies, she continued modeling and began her personal firm, H & H Trend, with photographer Henry Castro, working totally on ladies’s clothes catalogs.
“Helen Williams is my inspiration,” says Bethann Hardison, a style mannequin, one other Versailles alumna and activist whose latest documentary “Invisible Magnificence” wrote in an e-mail documenting her historical past within the trade. “Very respectful. That is simply the way in which she is.”
