Before there were supermodels, there was Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn— a Swedish beauty who epitomized the elegant hauteur of the golden age of couture. The post-war boom might have made couturiers into household names, but models remained anonymous, if living and breathing, mannequins, onto whom designers and photographers could project their ideals. “I’m just a good clothes hanger,” said Fonssagives-Penn when she was on the cover of Time in September 1949. It’s as outrageous a statement as Linda Evangelista’s “we won’t get out of bed for less than 10,000 a day” quip, not least of all because it is so patently far from reality. The subtitle that ran under the model’s name in that 1949 magazine feature read: “Do illusions also sell refrigerators?” and the story was really about this so-called “billion-dollar baby’s” success, as measured by her hourly rate.
Models are tasked with bringing the fantasy of fashion to life, both bodily and in terms of mood or vibe. Fonssagrives-Penn’s physicality is a recurring theme in Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn: Fashion Icon (SKIRA), a book that grew out of an exhibition earlier this year at the MEP (Maison Européenne de la Photographie) in Paris. The show and book highlight Tom Penn’s gift to the museum of a cache of personal photographs from his mother’s estate. These are images that had been given to the model by the photographers with whom she worked. Some of them, being variations of images that ran in Vogue or other publications, might be familiar. Least known, and most expressive of the model’s range of movement, are pictures from the 1930s by Fernand Fonssagrives, the model’s first husband.
Born in Sweden, née Bernstone, Fonssagrives-Penn was raised in an artistic family, and would take up photography, sculpture, and even fashion design in the course of her long life. Her path to modeling was through dance. After studying the art in Berlin, Fonssagrives returned home to teach herself. Astrid Malmborg, a Swedish choreographer, invited Fonssagrives-Penn to participate in a competition in Paris, for which they received some recognition, and the young Swede decided to stay on in the City of Light. It was there she met and married Fonssagrives, a fellow dancer. When he hurt his back and could no longer perform, she gave him a camera and became his muse.
Fonssagrives-Penn was introduced to Vogue via a run-in with the German fashion photographer Willy Maywald, who asked to take her picture. She recalled, “They asked me to do a test with Horst and I arrived terrified. I had never seen a fashion magazine; I didn’t know what fashion was. After that test with Horst, I went straight to the Louvre and studied how differently dressed people did different things.”
Fonssagrives-Penn also said that she “was terribly serious about being responsible and even studied photography to learn what the problems might be. I would stand before the camera on a set and concentrate my energy until I could sense it radiate into the lens and feel the photographer had the picture. It was very hard work!” But there were benefits—for the model and the rest of us. It was at the sitting for the magazine’s 1947 “Twelve Most-Photographed Models” group portrait, that the model first met Irving Penn, whom she married three years later. Together they went on to create some of fashion’s most indelible images.
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