About me: Lisa Fonssagrives (May 17, 1911 – February 4, 1992), born Lisa Bernstone in Sweden, was a model.
Lisa Fonssagrives has been credited as the first supermodel. [1] Her image appeared on the cover of many magazines during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s from Town & Country, Life and the original Vanity Fair. She moved from Sweden to Paris to train for ballet [2]. Fonssagrives once described herself as a "good clothes hanger".[1]
She worked with fashion photographers which included George Hoyningen-Huene, Man Ray, Horst, Erwin Blumenfeld, George Platt Lynes, Richard Avedon, and Edgar de Evia. She married Parisian photographer Fernand Fonssagrives in 1935; they divorced. She later married photographer Irving Penn in 1950.
Lisa Fonssagrives died at the age of 80, survived by her second husband, Irving Penn and her two children, daughter, Mia Fonssagrives-Solow, a costume designer and her son, Tom Penn, a designer.[
