Long before Gisele Bündchen, Cindy Crawford, or Linda Evangelista ruled the runways, fashion was held in the sway of the very first supermodel, Lisa Fonssagrives. Born in Sweden, in 1911, Fonssagrives was already a trained dancer and sculptor before having her photos taken by Horst P. Horst in 1936. Fonssagrives’s preternaturally elegant, patrician air and skill with movement and understanding of her body made her a natural in front of the camera, and soon image-makers from Horst to Man Ray to Richard Avedon were lining up to shoot her.
A regular in the pages of Vogue, Fonssagrives’s most important collaboration in both art and life was her relationship with Irving Penn, whom she met on set in 1947 and would eventually marry. Penn photographed his wife and muse countless times during their marriage, and several of his images of Fonssagrives have gone on to become iconic. Capturing her sporting a hat made of chicken feathers or nestled in robes in a Moroccan palace, Penn brought out the best in her. Whether she was wearing Cristóbal Balenciaga’s petal dress in a studio portrait or dangling precariously from the Eiffel Tower, Fonssagrives projected an image of unflappable glamour that’s just as relevant today as it was when the pictures were taken.
—Janelle Okwodu, Style.com
