Lisa Fonssagrives

Lisa Fonssagrives is usually called the first supermodel, was a trained dancer and a sculptor, and thought the modelling was the least interesting thing about her. She was born Lisa Bernstone in Sweden, trained in dance in Berlin under a teacher of the Wigman school, and was working as a dancer in Paris when a photographer stopped her in a lift and asked whether she would model a hat. What she brought to it was the dancer's control: she could hold a shape, place her hands exactly, and understand what a photographer needed before being told, which is why Horst, Hoyningen-Huene, Man Ray, Blumenfeld, Beaton and Avedon all wanted her. Erwin Blumenfeld photographed her hanging from the Eiffel Tower in 1939. She was on some two hundred Vogue covers, and was among the first models paid enough and named often enough to be a public figure rather than an anonymous clothes-horse. She married Irving Penn in 1950 after he photographed her, and they were together for forty-two years. She went back to sculpture and painting in the 1960s and exhibited into her seventies, and was consistently irritated by being described only as a face. Her first husband was the photographer Fernand Fonssagrives, whose name she kept professionally. She modelled for the Eiffel Tower photograph suspended by a cable with no safety line, which she described as the least frightening job she had. She had two children and exhibited sculpture in New York galleries. She once said she had always been a good clothes hanger and nothing more, which her family read as irony.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history