Daphne Selfe, a willowy British model recognized by Guinness World Records as the oldest working female professional model in the world after a career comeback in her 70s, died on Saturday in London. She was 97.
Her death, at a residential care home, was confirmed by her daughter Rose Wordsworth.
With her slender 5-foot-7 figure, cascading gray hair and high cheekbones, Ms. Selfe retained well into her senior years the striking appearance that had first won her modeling jobs in her 20s.
But after modeling for a few years as a young woman, she married in the mid-1950s, she said, and then her main focus was on raising her children. By the 1960s, when gamine models like Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton had become synonymous with Swinging Sixties London, she felt out of vogue.
For a while, she appeared in commercials for Kellogg’s cornflakes and modeled for the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. She was also cast in dozens of bit parts in movies, including James Bond films like “Octopussy” (1984) and “A View to a Kill” (1985). As she jokingly lamented to the Daily Express in Britain in 2016, however, she “wasn’t a Bond girl.”
But within months of being widowed in 1997, she told The Daily Telegraph in 2018, she received a call asking her to model for the English fashion brand Red or Dead during London Fashion Week. “It was something to do,” she said. “I thought it might stop me moping.”
She was met with a standing ovation. Then, on the recommendation of a stylist, she was featured in a British Vogue article on aging in 1998. Nick Knight, the renowned fashion photographer, did the shoot, which led to Ms. Selfe being signed later that year by Models 1, the London agency that represented Twiggy and Linda Evangelista.
Ms. Selfe soon found herself traveling as far as South Africa for lucrative work that she described to the Daily Mail in 2009 as “a welcome addition to my pension.” Over the years, she was featured in numerous advertisements, as well as campaigns for Dolce & Gabbana and the discount retailer TK Maxx, and in a music video for Paul McCartney’s 2013 song “Queenie Eye.”
She also embraced the largely youthful world of online influence. Her Instagram account, which has some 70,000 followers, flourished at a time when older women had begun to harness social media as a way of challenging traditional ideas about aging.
Ms. Selfe became what many British publications, including The Daily Telegraph in 2002, called “the face of ‘granny chic.’” Inevitably, she would be asked about her skin-care and diet regimen. Her reply: “Nivea, broccoli and the odd glass of champagne.”
Daphne Frances Selfe was born on July 1, 1928, in the Muswell Hill district of North London. Her father, Francis Selfe, was a classics teacher. Her mother, Irene (Garraway) Selfe, was an opera singer who also worked for the Bank of England. In Ms. Selfe’s 2015 memoir, “The Way We Wore: A Life in Clothes,” she wrote that after giving birth, her mother vowed, “Never again.”
Growing up in Berkshire, in South East England, she was taught to appreciate clothing from an early age. Her mother, whose own style was restrained — simple dresses, streamlined skirt suits and just a bit of powder and rouge, but never lipstick — made all of her clothes.
When Daphne was 8, she was sent to boarding school. As a student at Queen Anne’s School in the Caversham suburb of Reading, west of London, she learned to sew, building upon the D.I.Y. teachings of her mother. Eventually, her love of clothing turned into a sales job at Heelas, a department store that is now part of the John Lewis chain.
When she was 21, a scout approached her during a shift at the store and mentioned a competition to be on the cover of a local publication, The Reading Review. She entered and won. She went on to model for a fashion wholesaler, a furrier in London and then for department stories like Debenhams.
In her later years, Ms. Selfe often spoke about how modeling had changed over the years. Photographers and agents once taught models how to behave on set, she said, and how to pose, presenting their most flattering angle to the camera.
“We were taught manners, how to approach people, go for a job, and how to get in and out of a car without showing your knickers,” she said in British Vogue in 2015.
She married Jim Smith, a TV studio manager, in 1954; he died in 1997. In addition to their daughter Rose, she is survived by another daughter, Claire Selfe; a son, Mark; and four grandchildren.
Ms. Selfe, whose final modeling job was last year, used her late-in-life recognition to start a modeling academy, a six-week course that encouraged women of all ages who felt invisible to act with greater confidence.
“It’s an aging population. Now there are more older models,” she told the Daily Express in 2016. “I think we have set a trend.”
As she told BBC Three Counties Radio in 2017, “I became successful when I embraced my age and went gray. It made me more striking.”
She added: “I’ve had more modeling success since I was 70 than I ever did when I was 20.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
Bonnie Wertheim is an editor and occasional writer for the Style section.
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