Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn | Irving Penn's Muse
"I’m just a good clothes hanger.” Humble words, indeed, considering the speaker was model Lisa Fonssagrives, one of the most elegant women ever to wear a dress. She was at the height of her career in 1949 when Time put her on its cover. Fonssagrives was by then known to women nationwide as the face that sold them everything from hair dye to haute couture. Commanding a rate of $40 an hour when other top models topped out around $25, Fonssagrives was “a billion-dollar baby with a billion-dollar smile and a billion-dollar salesbook in her billion-dollar hand,” the magazine gushed. “She is the new goddess of plenty.”
She was also the apple of Irving Penn’s eye. “Yes, yes, YES!” Time’s reporter recorded Vogue’s star lensman murmuring excitedly during a photo shoot with Fonssagrives. “That’s so beautiful . . .” Photographer and muse had met two years before, at Penn’s memorable “12 Beauties” sitting for Vogue. It was a coup de foudre for Penn, who placed his future wife at the center of the composition, a delicate ice-carved swan. Fonssagrives—whose marriage to the dancer-photographer Fernand Fonssagrives was by then dissolving—would marry Penn in the summer of 1950, just after he photographed her in the fall collections in an old top-floor studio in Paris.
There, under the pristine north light favored by artists for its neutrality and evenness, Penn posed his models, cinched and trussed in the latest couture confections, against a mottled gray nineteenth-century theater curtain. Spread across two issues that September, the groundbreaking fashion portfolio marked a stark departure from the elaborately staged sets favored by the likes of Cecil Beaton, for whom Fonssagrives posed only once. (“I really wasn’t his type,” she said.)
But she was definitely Penn’s. The two shared a similar stripped-down sensibility: Penn didn’t go in for props or fantasy settings, instead believing that the subject itself was powerful enough to drive the shot; he focused intently on making images that “burn on the page” (as Allene Talmey, a Vogue features editor, once put it). Though often dressed to the nines, the Swedish-born Fonssagrives was a barefoot soul who liked to swim in the nude. She was comfortable enough in her well-toned, slender body—her Barbie-doll waist could be cinched to a mere seventeen inches—to bare all before the camera, daringly sunbathing naked at the edge of a cliff; or pensive and fragile behind a harp’s long strings.
From her first test shots with Horst P. Horst in 1936, Fonssagrives had studied the nuances of modeling—“Making a beautiful picture is making art, isn’t it?” she asked—with a photographer’s eye, observing the way light hit the dress she was wearing as well as its drape. Then, with a discipline and dramatic flair learned from years of dance, she would stand in front of the camera and, as she once put it, “concentrate my energy until I could sense it radiate into the lens.” She called it “still dancing.”
Fonssagrives was by 1950 a consummate professional, at the age of 39 having modeled for fourteen years for top talents like Horst and Erwin Blumenfeld, who in 1939 snapped her in a flowing Lucien Lelong dress swinging gaily from an Eiffel Tower girder for French Vogue. (A bit of a daredevil, Fonssagrives flew planes and zoomed into Manhattan for modeling jobs in her red-upholstered Studebaker convertible, collecting tickets all the way.)
“There was a gravitas about her that imposed admiration and respect,” Condé Nast’s editorial director Alexander Liberman once said. Fonssagrives turned her body into an exquisite sculpture. She wore Balenciaga’s beige wool duvetyn mantle coat, its arms laddered with giant folds, as a Queen would her cape—her eyebrows arching over expressive cat eyes and high, planed cheeks. A slight twist of her torso gave Rochas’s mermaid sheath the sinuous motion of a sea siren, as she flicked her mer-tail of rustling silk taffeta.
“I was a sculptor all my life,” said Fonssagrives-Penn, who had a successful second career in that field. “I was a form in space.”
source | vogue, christies
source | showstudio, artic.edu
