Patty Sylvia looks dead level into the cover of French Elle for 31 October 1988: blue eyes, red mouth, a silver zip cutting diagonally across a black top. Issue 2234 was a beauty special, twenty-five pages on skin, and the cover itself was split in two. In a dealer's photographs of a copy, one half folds back to show her winking underneath, with an Orlane skincare advert on the inside of the flap. The dealer credits the picture to Oliviero Toscani, who photographed Monica Bellucci for an Elle cover that year, though I haven't found a second source for this one.

She had stumbled into modelling after three years of not knowing what to do after high school. The photographer on her first job, in Boston, took her picture back to an agency in London, and at 21 she flew there on her first international flight. The London agent passed her on to the Clip agency in Paris, and she arrived with no French, a map and a list of addresses. "I didn't know the language, I didn't know the money, I was totally culture shocked," she told an interviewer in 2020. She hated the city and felt unsafe in it, but that's where her career took off, and Paris became her base whatever she thought of it.

By her account, covers like this one were for recognition rather than money. Recognition brought advertising, Joseph and Guess among it, and once things picked up she was taking home $1,250 a day on the days she worked. She dates her first cover to 1986 and her last, for Elle, to 1990, and in 1989 she turned up in New Order's video for "Round & Round." America never came through, she said: "I was never successful in America because my look was too ethnic at the time. I had curly hair and full lips and back then the American ideal of beauty was Cindy Crawford." Arthur Elgort did shoot her in Ralph Lauren for Vogue in August 1988, and American Elle put her on its cover that November, so America booked her; it just never made her its ideal.

As she got older she tired of having no say: "It got really hard to not have a voice in an industry where you're an object." At her final shoot she couldn't get dressed or put on the makeup: "I was just done." At 30 she moved home to Rhode Island, took degrees in psychology and social work, and by 2020 was working on a hospice team in Bristol. She says modelling prepared her for one part of that job, walking into a room of strangers and feeling comfortable. "With hospice my focus is how to live until you die," she said. "There's no baloney."

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