“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. Swooping hats and lacquered lips are matched by poached eggs and poppies, and the canons of couture meet Hell’s Angels, Sherpa climbers, and frontline soldiers. 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 (MEP) underscores in its 30th-anniversary exhibition “Penn & Fashion,” which opens next Wednesday in Paris.
A collaboration with the Irving Penn Foundation and the Nicola Erni Collection, the timely tribute unfurls chronologically beginning in 1947—the year Christian Dior’s Bar suit launched a fashion revolution. Gone was the “Make do and mend” mentality of a besieged Europe—fabrics suddenly flowed in a postwar embrace of plenty. With Paris re-emerging as the fashion capital, in were the wasp waists and corolla skirts of Dior’s 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.