This weekly magazine belonged to Marcel Dassault, the tycoon of french aerospace industry, who started it as a tool for political influence, but soon made it his hobby, spending more of his time hiring and sacking editors and photographers, than worrying about his factories and the stock exchange. His whims and excentricities were a legend in the French press world. Dassault noticed my work in JARDIN DES MODES, and asked me to photograph for him in a similar way, i.e. in the streets rather than in the studio. But as JOURS DE FRANCE had never done fashion photography, and none of its editors had any experience of it, I was given a free hand in choosing dresses and models (which in a real fashion magazine would have been unthinkable). Being myself rather ignorant of the subtleties of High Fashion, and more interested in the models who were wearing it, I just picked the prettiest girls and the deepest "décolletés". Dassault seemed to share my taste: he decided to run the photographs over the whole magazine, rather than on eight pages as planned. He also decreed that all future issues should carry some fashion photography, and immediately assigned me to shoot bathing suits on the French north coast. I hired the sexiest models I could find, certain that a couple of beautiful girls, photographed in front of the majestic cliffs of Etretat, would please the boss even more than the "décolletés" in the streets. But I was mistaken: what Dassault really wanted, was to improve his magazine with what he considered a high-class look. When I arrived with the new photographs, he just glanced at them and dismissed me without a word.