By Condé Nast Archive
by Laird Borrelli-Persson
By 1958 the dream of a dress from a French couture house had so infiltrated the popular imagination that Paul Gallico would write a novel, Mrs. ’Arris Goes to Paris (later turned into a film), about a British charwoman who scrimped and saved to get to Paris and the maison of Christian Dior - the designer who helped revitalize the venerable French industry after the Second World War.
Though the designer seemed to have been looking through rose-colored glasses when imagining his romantic, curvy, femme fleur ideal, he was also a clear-eyed businessman.
It’s been reported that by 1950, maison Dior was responsible for half of the Parisian couture’s entire export revenue.
Couture existed long before Dior, of course. Though postwar it was still for the elite - its value rooted in craftsmanship - there was a lot hanging on a dress, as different ideals and meanings were projected onto its elaborate canvas.
Liberation in the feminist sense was not part of the picture. These were clothes that women, who were still referred to by their husband’s surnames, adapted to, rather than the other way around.
There’s an old joke that the only way to get into one of Charles James’s sculptural gowns was to slide into it from the top of a baby grand piano.
The Twelve Most Photographed Models (1947) by Irving PennCondé Nast Archive
These were highly decorative dresses for women, some of superlative beauty who, on the surface at least, were living the life of Riley.
–which makes it highly ironic that the man who created the images that depicted and defined the so-called Golden Age of Couture was a 33-year-old American ex-serviceman who preferred sneakers to suits.
Seven years after Penn started at Vogue, shooting mostly still lifes and portraits, Alexander Liberman, the magazine’s creative director, deemed him ready to catalogue the couture collections; and, after advising him to buy a jacket, sent him to Paris.
Rochas Mermaid Dress (Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn) (1950) by Irving PennCondé Nast Archive
There in a rickety studio, a former photography school, appropriately infused as Penn wrote, with “the light of Paris as I had imagined it, soft but defining,” he created magic.
Gilded interiors and rococo splendor make a fine setting for haute couture, as many a Vogue photograph from this period demonstrates, but Penn’s approach was to strip all but the essentials away.
By this time the photographer was known for creating revealing portraits of personalities whom he placed in makeshift corners. “This confinement,” he said, “surprisingly seemed to comfort people, soothing them. The walls were a surface to lean on or push against.”
The only prop he used for the 1950 collection shoot, in which the clothes themselves are protagonists, was a discarded theatrical curtain.
The resulting images are not only filled with light but also have a sense of openness, which in turn illuminates both the details of the garments and the exquisite line of the beauties who wore them.
Among the models animating the pieces was Lisa Fonssagrives, the Swede who Penn married soon after the sitting.
Also pictured was Bettina Graziani (here seen on the right), who would later become engaged to Aly Khan and, in the course of her long career, was a muse to the couturiers Jacques Fath and Hubert de Givenchy, respectively.
The photos from Penn's sitting were published in consecutive issues of Vogue: September 1 and 15, 1950. The stuff of dreams, they remain high-water marks for both photography and fashion. With a clear vision, Penn employed quality of light and purity of line to attain the the highest expression of his art while capturing that of another.
Almost 70 years later, designers still look to that era—and to those pictures, specifically—as the epitome of what couture can be.
