Hong Kong's original catwalk queen tells her story in autobiography

Long before today's flavour-of-the-month single-initial supermodels, there was a Hong Kong-born-and-bred catwalk star named Grace Yu, who was successful enough to become the resident model at such Paris houses as Dior and Givenchy in the late 1970s. She has now chronicled her 30-year career in an autobiography in Chinese called Queen of the Runway. At the launch on Friday at Central's Bookcafe, Yu recounted her humble beginnings, going from factory girl and waitress to posing for department store campaigns thanks to her 180cm height.

'In my time, there were only a handful of professional models in Hong Kong,' Yu recalled. 'So when we did shows here in Hong Kong, we had to improvise all sorts of things on the runway to kill time. Whereas for the runway shows in Europe, models were only required to simply walk up and down. It was a piece of cake for me.'

In addition to being a success abroad, she also helped train the likes of QiQi and Janet Ma Sze-wai. 'Models these days have a very high exposure level in the media, whereas in the past, models were just models and I think we were more professional.'

Nowadays, Yu focuses her energy on other areas, such as designing clothes. However, she looks like she can still burn a catwalk with her fierceness. Queen of the Runway is out now.