Maggie Prescott, the Editor-in-Chief of New York based Quality, a fashion magazine that sets trends i.e. leads instead of follows, has come up with her latest brainchild: to feature a model to be the Quality Woman, complete with successful Paris-based designer Paul Duval to devise a new collection inspired by her. The Quality Woman is not only to embody beauty, but also intellect. Against Maggie's initial judgment, she relents to the vision of her head photographer Dick Avery in choosing Jo Stockton rather than one of their in-house models as the Quality Woman, Jo the clerk they met in an impromptu photo shoot they did against her will in the Greenwich Village bookstore where she works. The marks against Jo are not only that she isn't a professional, but that she has what she even considers a funny looking face, something that Dick instead calls interesting. Jo, who abhors all that the world of fashion represents in she being an intellectual, ultimately agrees as the job would take her to Paris where she hopes to meet her idol, Professor Émile Flostre, the leading philosopher on the concept of empathicalism. But in Paris, the two worlds for Jo begin to collide in more ways than one, arguably the most important in she falling for Dick, his actions solely to get her to exude the emotions he wants for the photos.