Art & Culture

Legendary Fashion Photographer Irving Penn Celebrated in Career-Spanning Show

The Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) hosts a classic retrospective on an artist who defined visual elegance in a changing world

By Rena Gross

September 24, 2026

Blurred Irving Penn group photo of twelve elegantly dressed models in a studio, showcasing various fashion styles and poses. — Irving Penn *12 Models Moving Their Heads.* Photo: © The Irving Penn Foundation. Nicola Erni Collection, Zug

For over six decades, Irving Penn was a go-to name at the peak of fashion photography. His work took him from Dior’s New Look in post-WWII France to Nicolas Ghesquière’s Balenciaga. “PENN & FASHION,” a new exhibition at MEP in Paris, looks at the long view through his lens.

Person in checkered dress, wide-brimmed hat, and black gloves sitting on chair, exuding vintage and elegant style. — Irving Penn, *Harlequin Dress (Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn),* New York, (1950) Photo: The Irving Penn Foundation Collection, New York © Condé Nast

Person in traditional attire with shawl and hat, facing away, standing on patterned floor with textured backdrop. — Irving Penn *Standing Woman with Braids*. Photo: © The Irving Penn Foundation

The show is organized chronologically. The exhibition brings together Penn’s earliest Vogue fashion photographs with a youthful detour to Cuzco. Images feature such celebrated models as Jean Patchett and Penn’s wife, Lisa Fonssagrives, before moving through the quintessential faces and labels of subsequent decades. The hand of legendary Vogue Editor in Chief and Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute impresario Diana Vreeland is here too. Ungaro and Courrèges share time with Marisa Berenson and Lauren Hutton in the 1970s, followed in the next decade by designs from Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld. Throughout his later work, Penn remained preoccupied with silhouette, volume, and texture, qualities that carried into his color photographs of Galliano, Christian Lacroix, and elaborate feathered creations from Chanel.

Black and white Irving Penn portrait of Nicole Kidman in elegant, flowing attire with layered necklaces and ornate accessories. — Irving Penn *Jean Paul Gaultier Couture (Nicole Kidman)*. Photo: © Condé Nast

Irving Penn photographs of model Naomi Sims posing in a fringed floral dress against a plain background. — Irving Penn *Naomi Sims in Scarf*. Photo: © The Irving Penn Foundation

A substantial part of the exhibition also considers Penn’s 13-year collaboration with Issey Miyake. Beginning in 1983, the partnership operated through a degree of separation: Penn did not attend Miyake’s runway shows, while the designer stayed away from Penn’s shoots, instead sending the clothes to the photographer and waiting to see what came back. The resulting images transformed Miyake’s garments into studies of folds, surfaces, texture, and form.

Drawn principally from the collections of the MEP and the Nicola Erni Collection in Zug, the show also includes loans from the Irving Penn Foundation and the Miyake Issey Foundation. Among the works highlighted by the museum are Christian Dior, New York from 1947, Fashion Photograph (Jean Patchett) from 1949, Balenciaga Roses Dress from 1967, and Penn’s 1988 photograph of Yves Saint Laurent’s Braque-inspired embroidered Cubist cape.

The Maison Européenne de la Photographie, which is a few blocks from the Seine in the Marais district, is currently celebrating its 30th anniversary season. Penn, a founding artist of the collection, is a fitting subject for that landmark, having maintained a close relationship with the institution in the final decades of his life.