Angela de Moraan album compiled by Jasmine Kuylenstierna

2

3

By the mddle of the sixties, Ingela outgrew her tiny native village in the middle of Sweden, and went to Paris to study art and French. When low on finances, she started modelling as a means of earning some extra money. Mostly by happenstance, she spent a few years modelling while also assisting artists and being one herself. She couldn’t really relate to the superficiality of the whole business, and so never took it too seriously for

her own good.

As my aunt, Ingela has told me many stories about her Paris days (which were followed by studies in the States before moving to London, then Switzerland, Germany, and back to Paris, before finally settling in London), and I thought it was time to put some of the images accompanying

these stories together.

4

5

6

7

The Paris Years: late sixties

“I’d always wanted to go to Paris to study. It was an amazing time to be there because there was so much going on, it really felt like you were

part of an era that people would remember.”

8

“Being a model wasn’t all that glamorous, really; I didn’t earn a lot of money even as an in-house model for Guy Laroche or Guerlain. I didn’t

go to a lot of parties, I preferred reading and painting.”

12

13

14

15

16

17

“My sister back home might have been jealous of me; at least that’s how it felt as she grew more and more distant from me.

I’d always been very close to my father though, and that stayed the same. He would keep scrapbooks with photographs and newspaper clippings about me, and I would sometimes send him images from the modelling jobs I’d been doing lately. Although he was a very busy man, working with projects concerning the land and the forest he owned, as well as

constructing a local wildlife museum, he would always be interested in what I was up to and how I was doing in Paris.

I’d drag home boyfriends to visit my parents and it was funny how their cultures and backgrounds would be so different from mine. My father

would present them with elk horns or hunting knives and the posh Paris boys would never know what to do with them. It made me laugh.

Maybe I’d always known that I would be different myself, from the day that I exclaimed as a young girl at Sunday school how God didn’t

make any sense, and that therefore, He couldn’t be real. I remember my teachers promising to throw me out before my mother convinced them to

let me stay, but from that day onwards I’ve been a buddhist.”

18

19

20

21

22

25

27

28

29

“I worked a few seasons for Guy Laroche, which was probably one of my favourite places. He was a very sweet man, and he always took the

time to stop and talk for a few minutes to see how you were doing. These drawings were based on me, and I got the coat at the top.

I met lots of other interesting fashion designers, most of them spectacularly eccentric and also rather weird. I remember how Yves Saint Laurent appeared as a tiny tiny man clad in velvet, at the far end of a long corridor, therefore seeming even smaller. He was like

many of the other designers in the way that he seemed to fear women as much as he admired them; he would never make eye contact but would

nonetheless create these amazing pieces of clothing.

No-one in this business is ‘straight’. The fashion world offers a sort of freedom, or non-judgemental mentality when it comes to that - it’s art,

so anything goes, really. The men might be more obviously queer, but you shouldn’t forget about

the women and all the great dykes... Chanel as well as most of the others, they put great value into truly appreciating a beautiful woman...

They might have been a bit more discreet about whom they were fucking though.”

“As an in-house model, they’d spend weeks sewing the dresses straight onto us, modelling them after our individual measurements. So they’d know which dress was a perfect fit for which model, they’d put name tags in

them. Because one of my legs was slightly shorter than the other, they usually

made some dresses that only I could wear. The ‘Angela’ dresses.

I watched an auction on telly the other week where they sold vintage haute couture pieces of clothing, and one of the Balmain dresses had my name in it! I couldn’t believe the name tag was still there, but it was one of the

‘Angela’ dresses.”

30

31

32

“When the first moon landing took place, they dressed 15 of us girls as astronauts and let us walk around the Champs-Élysées. It was good fun!”

33

34

35

“I made friends with the most wonderful girls, and I’m still in touch with a lot of them even though they’re literally all over the world

now.”

“I wanted to work with something else than fashion and get out of that whole business, so I put an ad into Le Figaro describing some of my qualities; such as being an experienced model and

painter, as well as fluent in several languages. I got two replies. One of them was from the French fashion council, which wanted to send me to New York as a fashion ambassadeur. There was no way I wanted to do that for the rest of my

life! I knew that I’d much rather stay in Europe. So I turned them down. The other one was weird - the sender didn’t reveal his identity but wrote that he lived in a house where some of the rooms and fireplaces were in the shapes of eggs. It sounded very cryptical,

like some kind of crazy artist, and I guess I could relate to that! In his letter he’d put an address of a hotel near the Place Vendôme, so on some weekday afternoon I strolled down there to take a look. I arrived, and the place was packed with toga-wearing men and all kinds of strange people and things. I made my way to the entrance of a huge ballroom, where the doorman asked me whom I was there to see. I gave him the name I had been told to ask for in the letter, and so the doorman lets me in and points to the man I’m apparently there to see. I shake a lot of hands and say hello to a lot of people on my way, but I’d never seen any of them before. I walk up to the man I was looking for, who turns out to be the owner of a gallery, and he in turn takes me to see the man who replied to my ad. At the far end of a long table, among a number of people, I catch a glimpse of a small man with an impressive moustache. I realize that this is Salvador Dali, and after a quick chat with him it is decided that I’m going to work as his personal assistant for the coming few months when he will be staying in Paris.I remember visiting him every now and then in his suite at the hotel. In the main salon he had a very long baguette going almost from one end of the room to the other, arranged on metal sticks a bit above the floor. And stuffed goats. I didn’t really understand the baguette to be

honest, and I didn’t ask him about it. He was a very loving man, he could really appreciate people he met and how beautiful they were. But he was asexual. He was married, but they never slept together; it was artistic love at a platonic level between the two of them. A mutual understanding. His wife, on her part, used to entertain herself with a pair of Finnish toyboy twins. At least that’s what it was during the

time I worked around them. I used to run around at flea markets, looking for rennaisance paintings for him. He would later add details to the paintings; I remember one painting I found and bought for him on which he

painted lobsters with forks I think. It’s interesting to think of how I helped him to shape and develop some of his artwork! It’s like

I’m part of the art history books now.

36

37

38

39

40

“Oh, all the men and crazy characters I’ve dated over the years... Rich and beautiful men from all over the place. But you get tired of beauty after a while, because so many of them don’t expect anything more from themselves. What really gets me going is the interesting

and intellectual types, the real artists. I’d much rather be with someone ugly and interesting, someone that actually makes use of their imagination a bit.

Now, I’d probably say that the love of my life was a Swiss man... We lived together for a while, in lots of places, but then he had to go back to Paris while I wanted to stay in

London. That’s why we split up. He went on to marry some hopeless Swiss girl and had a child with her back home,

meanwhile I happened upon the man who was to become my husband for 14 years and so me and the Swiss man never got another chance at being together...

Not very long after we’d both gotten married, the Swiss man killed himself. He can’t have been more than 40 years old. I can’t imagine why he would do that to his little boy... I simply can’t understand what made him so unhappy as to do that to anyone that loved him. I always

did.

My husband? Yes, he was actually very beautiful, as well as intelligent. But he was away a lot of the time, I had to spend eight months of the year without him.

We were going to adopt two babies from El Salvador but the boy died before we got there. Still, we went there to meet the most beautiful baby girl, she was so tiny. We think that she must probably have been the secret lovechild of a powerful general and the cleaning lady of his house, as that was the position that the girl’s mother held. I also can’t see any other reason as to why we were greeted by an entire conference room full of influential

government people.

So I’m telling you Jasmine, go with your gut feeling. It doesn’t matter if you’re young or old. It doesn’t matter how many people you meet on the way. When you meet someone special, you have to trust your instincts. If you feel in your heart that your love is true, then take

very good care of it.”

41

6 Cromwell Grove, Shepherd’s Bush, London, 2006-2012

44

45

46

47

“I am a collector of many things; there are so many that you can never have too much of!

For one, I always buy new wigs. There are a lot of great shops for that around here. There’s no need to dye your hair or cut it when you can have endless fun with wigs! Transformative quick fix. I am also very fond of fake moustaches. And beads, that I use for making jewellry for everyone I know. Life is too short for missing out on great costume parties with lots

of dazzling jewellry.”

48

49

50

51

“I’ve got a lot of gay friends, and so we figured it was time to give the soft toys a queer makeover too. They do look a lot more fabulous now,

wouldn’t you say?”

52

53

54

55

“I passed by a French restaurant once, and they were just about to prepare this poor little darling for dinner. I had to save him and his

friend, so I bought them from the restaurant. I think they got a much longer and happier life here with me, living in an old aquarium in my

studio room. They’d usually have bananas or salad.I am an animal lover, and having them around me is important. I’ve got

plenty of space in my house for cats, snails and other beings.”

56

57

58

“Once when they were visiting, we wrapped my sister’s husband, Hans the priest, from head to toe in toilet paper. He looked really great as a

religious mummy, I’m pretty sure he loved it! You might not think very highly of loo rolls but they can make for some great decorations.

I do miss certain things from home, from Mora, where I’m from. Like my family, and friends.

Sometimes I make these buns that I grew up with, they’re much better than any English ones I’ve tried. And I always buy my favourite food

and such whenever I go there to visit my old friends. I have considered selling this house and move back to Sweden, but every

time I’m there and there’s a snowstorm or something and you end up completely isolated in a wooden house in the middle of nowhere for

days or weeks, I panic. And I know that I will never go back. I’ve seen the world, and I’m more than happy to call London the centre of my

universe now. I don’t think I can ever go back home.Also, I’ve got friends with a stone castle in the south of France as well as houses in Morocco and they always tell me I should go live there instead.

So I might do that sometime. It’s something I haven’t done yet.”

59

60

61

62

63

“I always feed the pigeons and the squirrels that come to visit outside the window; obviously they’ve all got names. They’re characters too.”

64

65

66

67

68

69

70

71

72

73

“I would probably not have stayed in London if it wasn’t for my family. And now they’re all here, so I am happy to be here too. You spend your life meeting the strangest people, and to a certain extent you can pick and choose among them. Even if ‘family’ represents a lot of difficult things, and it can be tricky to hold all the pieces together, it’s what

you’ve got left in the end, and so you know that you’ll never be lonely.”

74

75