40 Glamorous Photos of Princess Natalia Pavlovna Paley as a Model During the Late 1920s and Early 1930s

Born in Boulogne-sur-Seine, close to Paris, France, on December 5, 1905 to the Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich of Russia and Olga Valeriovna Karnovich. Before she was even born, her parents were banned from returning the Motherland for marrying morganatically, a condition that then changed in 1912 when the Tzar Nicholas II revoked their exile and let them come back to St.Petersburg for the celebrations for the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty. To no one’s surprise, her family lived a privileged life in Russia until the October revolution of 1917.

Escaping first to Finland, then to Sweden and finally to France, Natalia and what was left of her close family (her sister Irina, her mother Olga and her half sister Marianne) settled in a villa in Biarritz, on the Atlantic coast.

Throughout her adolescence, she had difficulties with mixing with other girls her age, later recalling those moments in a seminal interview with a fashion magazine: “(I felt) so different from the others. At twelve, French girls were still reading Robinson Crusoe and watching Douglas Fairbanks movies. At twelve, I was taking some bread to my father in jail. How could I have been like them? I was mute, I would not play. But I was reading a lot. I had faced death, so close. My father, my brother, my cousins, my uncles, executed, all Romanov’s blood splashed on my adolescence. This gave me a taste for sad things, poetry, the icy and lightning antechamber of death. Soon, my classmates understood me. And respected the way I was, as strange as it may have seemed.”

At 21 she met couturier Lucien Lelong at one of her mother galas, whom immediately offered her a job at his fashion house, where she started originally within the Perfume department but then she quickly went onto modelling Lelong’s creations herself. Her aristocratic background and striking features made her an invaluable asset to Lelong’s business, and she quickly became a sought-after model and well-known socialite in Paris. She was known for her exquisite taste and for dictating her own fashion trends, often seen in hats and gloves, and was a favorite of leading photographers of the time, including Edward Steichen, Cecil Beaton, Horst P. Horst, and George Hoyningen-Huene. Her photographs frequently appeared in magazines like Vogue.

Her modeling career was her primary focus during this period, before she began to pursue a film career in the mid-1930s. Her mother passed away in 1929, marking a further separation from her Russian past.