Irving Penn’s Fashion Pictures Goes On View in Paris

“My father didn’t label himself as a fashion photographer,” muses Tom Penn, government director of the Irving Penn Foundation. Among the 1000’s of prints making up the elder Penn’s oeuvre, nonetheless lifes, metropolis store fronts, and nudes are as ever current as svelte fashions and era-defining kinds. 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 troopers. And but, whereas Irving Penn might not have recognized as a style photographer, style is elemental to his legacy, a truth the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) underscores in its Thirtieth-anniversary exhibition “Penn & Fashion,” which opens subsequent Wednesday in Paris.

A collaboration with the Irving Penn Foundation and the Nicola Erni Collection, the well timed tribute unfurls chronologically starting in 1947—the yr Christian Dior’s Bar go well with launched a style revolution. Gone was the “Make do and mend” mentality of a besieged Europe—materials all of a sudden flowed in a postwar embrace of loads. With Paris re-emerging as the style capital, in had been the wasp waists and corolla skirts of Dior’s New Look. This aesthetic flip towards the graphic and the sculptural had been suited to the younger photographer, who had studied drawing and design earlier than buying his first digital camera and shifting right into a lifelong collaboration with Vogue and couturiers corresponding to Dior, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Yves Saint Laurent, and Issey Miyake.