Helen Williams, a Top Model in a Segregated Era, Is Dead at 87

Helen Marie Williams was born on Sept. 16, 1935, in Burlington County, N.J., and grew up in East Riverton, a Delaware River city about 15 miles northeast of Philadelphia. Her father, Ellis L. Williams, was a chauffeur; her mom, Helen (Blackstone) Williams, a homemaker.

After highschool, Helen discovered a job as an assistant at Pagano Studios, a industrial pictures studio in Manhattan utilized by catalogs and promoting businesses. Bert Pagano, the proprietor, additionally specialised in kids’s pictures. Ms. Williams ultimately labored as a stylist there, and infrequently employed the fashions. Ms. Darden recalled being employed by her for a catalog shoot, and exhibiting up in her typical uniform, slacks and no make-up.

“It was not a bandbox look, and Helen didn’t approve,” stated Ms. Darden. “She got here from the period of gloves and matching purses and hose, with an additional pair saved in your bag in case you bought a run.”

Ms. Williams had a quick, early marriage to John Clayton Anderson. She married Norman Jackson, a males’s clothes salesman, in 1977. He died in 2017.

When Ms. Williams retired from modeling within the Seventies, she continued styling and had her personal firm, H & H Style, with Henry Castro, a photographer, working largely for ladies’s clothes catalogs.

“Helen Williams was my inspiration,” Bethann Hardison, the style mannequin — one other alum of the Battle of Versailles — and activist whose current documentary, “Invisible Beauty,” chronicles her historical past within the trade, wrote in an e mail. “A lot respect. She was it.”