David Bailey's favourite model Jean Shrimpton was the Shrimp who sparked the Sixties So far so entertaining - although surely even the Queen wore sunglasses in the sixties. There's a bigger niggle though: any photo of the real Shrimpton - even when she's barely out of Lucie Clayton - reveals a pulchritudinous gamine with heart-tugging, albeit gawky, grace. A a fashion editor would have spotted her potential, particularly Clare Rendlesham who, according to Nicky Haslam, "was the most avant-garde fashion editor in London." In fact, in his autobiography, Redeeming Features, Haslam reports that Lady Rendlesham "was entranced by Jean's absolutely modern look." It was Haslam, subsequently a close friend of the pair, who tried to persuade Bailey to dump Jean. "I remember commenting," he writes, "really out of loyalty to Rosemary [Bailey's then wife], but with extraordinary lack of prescience: 'She's a bit placid, David. You'll never make anything out of her."" Still, all dramas need tension. Played by Karen Gillan of Dr Who Fame, this Shrimpton is a resolute girl-next-door. There are plenty of girls-next-door-made-good in fashion, it's just that Shimpton wasn't one of them. She may, as Haslam recalls, have been a "conventional girl... who initially hardly spoke in his [Bailey's] presence." But she had full lips, soaring cheekbones and almond, Technicolour eyes. If Twiggy, who arrived later, in 1967, was the kooky, androgynous face of the 1960s, Shrimpton was the timeless beauty. And it's in the closing moments, when we see the real pictures that Bailey and Shrimpton shot on that first New York Odyssey, that We'll Take Manhattan stumbles. In them, Shrimpton is simply breathtaking. This may be one of the few instances when the celluloid character is less glamorous than the real one. Until then, it's a snappy enough ride. Aneurin Barnard, the actor playing Bailey, is so gobsmackingly handsome you have to wonder whether Bailey had a hand in the casting. And the clothes, many of them faithful replicas of the ones Shrimpton wore in the original shoot, are a treat (an impressive feat, given how little it cost to make). Half a century on, Shrimpton's and Bailey's black leather clobber still looks almost shockingly contemporary. And those pictures really were groundbreaking. "Vogue changed irrevocably after that shoot," says Robin Muir. Before that issue, it's all stiff, elegant, models standing with one leg in front of the other. The Shrimpton and Bailey pictures, which Vogue interspersed with coke bottles and other pop art insignia, ushered in a whole new wave. Bailey's big coup was to shoot on 35mm using a hand-held camera. "It meant he could point and shoot as Shrimpton sauntered down New York streets, as opposed to the classic Vogue shoot where Beaton made the models hold their poses for about a minute at a time," says Muir. There wouldn't have been any of the entourage of stylist's assistants, make-up artists and hair-dressers that comes as standard with today's shoots, either. Models did their own hair and make-up and were often expected to supply their own accessories, such as shoes. "It's hard to over-estimate their impact on fashion in that decade," says Muir. The most recent equivalent is the British Vogue pictures Corinne Day took of Kate Moss in her underwear in that grotty flat in the mid-1990s. The [magazine's] managing editor was so horrified by the contacts that she didn't dare show them to Alexandra Shulman, the editor, for days. After their New York shoot was published, Bailey and Shrimpton became superstars - reluctantly in her case. As she wrote: "I'm not interested in clothes and I hate people staring at me." That didn't prevent her, though, from modelling for more than a decade, during which she worked with all the greats, including Richard Avedon. By the late 1960s, she'd earned enough money to pay £13,000 in cash for a mews house in Knightsbridge - and dated two of the era's leading heart throbs. She left Bailey for Terence Stamp, then left him too, rejected Warren Beatty, escaped to deepest Wales where she took up photography (her subjects seemed to have mainly consisted of dead sheep; it wasn't a money spinner) and lived with the poet Heathcote Williams. She eventually settled with her handsome husband Michael Cox in relative obscurity in Penzance, where they run a hotel. To this day, she dodges photographers. 'We'll Take Manhattan" will be broadcast on Thursday, January 26, 2012 at 9pm on BBC Four