Model Shop is a 1969 romantic drama film written, directed and produced by Jacques Demy, starring Anouk Aimée, Gary Lockwood and Alexandra Hay, and featuring a guest appearance by Spirit who recorded the accompanying soundtrack.

Model Shop makes explicit the fact that Demy's films take place in the same narrative universe.

He is unemployed and in debt, his live-in girlfriend, aspiring actress Gloria, is tired of him, and his car is about to be repossessed.

Going round to friends to scrounge $100 to stave off the finance company, he sees a beautiful foreign woman in a white convertible and follows her to a mansion in the hills.

She enters a model shop, a tawdry studio where customers can take erotic photographs, and he books a session with her, but she is uninterested in his attentions.

When calling his parents, he learns that his draft notice has arrived, and he must report for Army duty the next week.

Abandoned by her husband Michel for a female gambler named Jackie Demaistre, she is trying to make enough money to return to France and her son.

He phones Lola, but her roommate tells him she flew to Paris that morning, having enough cash for a plane ticket.

[2]Demy initially wanted to have a new face in the leading role, and chose the then-unknown Harrison Ford.

Columbia Pictures, however, had no confidence in Ford's abilities and demanded that Demy hire a more experienced actor.

[11] In 2011, he included it in his "Cine-Autobiography", a list of unranked films which "opened doors or made [him] turn a corner.".

[12] Charlotte Garson notes how the films of Demy, as in the works of Balzac and Proust, create a universe in which not only themes but characters reappear.

A few of the recurring motifs in Model Shop are chance making or marring relationships, lovers parted by war, women surviving by near-prostitution and the US as a world of sunshine where people drive open-top cars.

Cécile is not only a character from Lola, which also featured her husband Michel, her lover Frankie and her child, but was mentioned in Les Demoiselles de Rochefort as well.

[14] When promoting Model Shop, Demy said he wanted to make an all-singing musical in the United States about students titled The Interview,[15] something that never materialised.

A brief portion of the film is seen at the beginning of the season seven episode of Mad Men titled "Field Trip", when the character Don Draper is shown watching it in a theater.

Brief clips of the film are used in the music documentary Echo in the Canyon to help set the feeling of 1960s Los Angeles.

Los Angeles pop culture historian Alison Martino named Model Shop "the inspiration for Echo in the Canyon.