“My father didn’t label himself as a fashion photographer,” muses Tom Penn, executive director of the Irving Penn Foundation. Among the thousands of prints making up the elder Penn’s oeuvre, still lifes, city shop fronts, and nudes are as ever present as svelte models and era-defining styles. And yet, while Irving Penn may not have identified as a fashion photographer, fashion is elemental to his legacy, a fact the Maison Européenne de la Photographie underscores in its 30th-anniversary exhibition “Penn & Fashion.” The timely tribute unfurls chronologically beginning in 1947—the year Christian Dior launched a postwar fashion revolution with the wasp waists and corolla skirts of his New Look. This aesthetic turn toward the graphic and the sculptural were suited to the young photographer, who had studied drawing and design before purchasing his first camera and moving into a lifelong collaboration with Vogue and couturiers such as Dior, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Yves Saint Laurent, and Issey Miyake. Penn’s concern for precise composition, lighting, and line is the basis of the style he purified through more than six decades of fashion photography. Some 150 prints spanning fashion, portraits, and travel photography—along with facsimiles of the unforgettable Vogue spreads in which many appeared—place Penn’s work in both a publishing and a global context. —Lacey Minot