Fashion is filled with photographs that have become almost as famous as the moments they captured. Images that outlived the collections they were commissioned to document, eventually becoming a significant part of its history. Within this realm, few were as prolific as 20th-century American photographer Irving Penn. When you think of him, visuals of model Lisa Fonssagrives enveloped in Balenciaga instantly come to mind. His 1950 photograph of her in the house’s mantle coat remains one of the most important pictures associated with the maison: the sweep of fabric falling from one shoulder, her gloved hand close to her face and the coat transformed from a couture piece into an unforgettable silhouette. And then there was Jean Patchett wearing an enormous black hat, her face obscured by a delicate veil, shot in 1950 for an American Vogue cover.
Penn was celebrated for an approach that stripped fashion photography back to its essentials. At a time when elaborate settings were commonplace, he frequently captured his subjects against plain backdrops, removing anything that might compete with the clothes. Composition became paramount, from the precise placement of the body to the way fabric occupied the frame. The result brought both the garment’s construction and the presence of the model wearing it sharply into focus.
Now more than a century after Penn’s birth, these images form a part of a sweeping tribute to the photographer and his extraordinary relationship with fashion. Opened at Paris’s Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) on 30 September, Penn & Fashion retraces more than six decades of his career. Bringing together some of his best-known shots alongside facsimiles of the Vogue pages in which they originally appeared, the exhibition offers a chance to see not only how he photographed clothes, but how the way he viewed them evolved as fashion itself changed. The setting carries particular significance: Penn had a close relationship with MEP from the early 1990s and was one of the founding artists of its collection, which holds more than 100 of his prints today. The archive was later enriched by a gift from his son, Tom Penn, including photos that once belonged to model, artist and collector Fonssagrives.
Much of that work was created during his extraordinary relationship with Vogue. Ironically, he had not joined the magazine as a photographer. When he arrived in 1943, he worked with art director Alexander Liberman on layouts and cover ideas, drawing on his training in graphic design under Alexey Brodovitch. Liberman soon recognised his keen eye and encouraged him to take the photographs himself.
Penn’s work for the publication also extended to its beauty section, where his full-page images became known as “stoppers” for their ability to halt readers mid-turn. Pictures like Bee on Lips from 1995 brought a surreal edge to the traditional beauty close-ups. What began with still lifes, developed into a career that saw him shoot fashion for Vogue through successive eras. He remained closely associated with the title until his final years.
The exhibition unfolds chronologically, from the late 1940s to 2008. The 1950s are particularly compelling, capturing a period when Parisian haute couture was undergoing its great post-war revival and Penn was there to record it. In the summer of 1950, he travelled to Paris to photograph the latest collections, setting up a daylight studio on Rue de Vaugirard. Houses like Balenciaga and Rochas delivered their clothes to the space, where an old theatre curtain served as his backdrop. Fonssagrives, whom Penn married, was his principal model. Not to be missed from this era is a spectacular image of the model wearing the graphic harlequin dress designed by Jerry Parnis. It appeared in a 1950 Vogue article titled The Black and White Idea.
By the 1960s, ready-to-wear was gaining ground and Diana Vreeland’s appointment as American Vogue’s editor-in-chief in 1963 ushered in a more exuberant era. Penn, however, remained faithful to his studio’s simplicity. He took pictures of André Courrèges’s and Emanuel Ungaro’s works against plain backgrounds, allowing their increasingly modern clothes to command the image.
In the following decade, Penn encountered fashion in an entirely different setting when Vreeland, then a special consultant to The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s The Costume Institute, organised an exhibition devoted to early 20th-century French fashion. He shot historic garments by designers including Paul Poiret, Madeleine Vionnet and Coco Chanel on resin mannequins in the museum’s galleries. The experience changed him in a way his years of photographing contemporary collections did not. He recalled feeling a thrill he had not experienced before.
As time went on, Penn’s roster of designers only grew. The 1980s saw him photograph Karl Lagerfeld’s designs for Chanel, as well as Yves Saint Laurent’s celebrated Hommage aux peintres collection, which translated the work of artists like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse into fashion. Perhaps his most fascinating collaboration later was with Issey Miyake. Between 1986 and 1999, he shot the designer’s creations without ever attending his shows. The clothes were sent to his New York studio, where he was free to interpret them through his lens. “Penn’s photographs allow me to see my own creations,” Miyake had once said.
Towards the end of his career, the creative became increasingly selective about the assignments he accepted. Among the images from these later years is his striking portrait of Nicole Kidman in Jean Paul Gaultier for Vogue in 2004.
What emerges at the MEP is the remarkable consistency of Penn’s eye, even as fashion changed. His work made a compelling case for looking closer – at the clothes and people who brought them to life.
On display at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris till 17 January 2027
This article was originally published in the October 2026 issue of Vogue Arabia
