Before Beverly, Iman, Veronica, Naomi and Tyra, there was Dorothea. Okay, so the name doesn’t conjure up images of beauty and glamour the way the ones I just listed do. But those fashion icons all walked through the doors Dorothea opened.

In the 1950s, Dorothea Towles Church was the first black model to sweep the Paris couture scene. A favorite of Christian Dior, for whom she dyed her hair platinum blond to create “contrast,” Church has said that in Paris, they saw her only as a beautiful woman. Of course, the Texas native did not have the same mainstream success in the United States, but magazines like Jet and Ebony would often publish articles detailing her Paris adventures.

But her growing fame did not eliminate prejudice on the part of some designers. At Schiaparelli, she once overheard someone describe her as Tahitian. While she worked for Pierre Balmain, she recalled, he would not allow her to borrow dresses for a photograph for Ebony magazine, fearing that would offend his white clientele. She took the clothes later on the pretext that she would wear them to a party, and the magazine then photographed them.

Church returned to the states in 1954 armed with trunk-loads of couture she had amassed through her work with different designers. She toured HBCUs, staging fashion shows with the never-before-seen designer clothes and throwing fundraisers for various branches of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.

Read more about the little-known Dorothea Church in Skin Deep: Inside the World of Black Fashion Models.