Irving Penn
American, 1917–2009
Rochas Mermaid Dress (Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn), Paris
INV-1448
Irving Penn
American, 1917–20091950, printed June 1979
Rochas Mermaid Dress (Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn), Paris
Irving Penn American, 1917–2009 →platinum/palladium printphotographic process
Date
1950, printed June 1979
Medium
Platinum-palladium print
Dimensions
Image: 50 × 50 cm (19 11/16 × 19 11/16 in.); Paper: 63.1 × 56 cm (24 7/8 × 22 1/16 in.); Mount: 66.1 × 56 cm (26 1/16 × 22 1/16 in.)
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Location
Chicago, IL
Credit
Gift of Irving Penn
In July 1950, Vogue magazine sent Irving Penn to Paris to document that year’s fall couture collections. Over the course of ten days, clothes by Balenciaga, Dior, Rochas, and others were rushed to an old top-floor studio, where Penn posed models against a discarded theater curtain. The resulting photographs, spread across two September issues, marked a stark departure from the elaborately staged sets favored by fashion photographers of the previous decade. Among the models, Lisa Fonssagrives was a standout—in 1949, at age 38, she had become the first model to grace the cover of Time magazine, earning the title “Billion-Dollar Baby.” The statuesque icon first captured Penn’s attention at a 1947 photo shoot, and in the years that followed she became his muse and collaborator. Just a few weeks after this photograph was taken the two were married.
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