(See Cover)
In a dazzling bright room high above the late summer landscape of Manhattan's Central Park stood an exquisite blonde in a regal white dress (by Hattie Carnegie). She rustled her billowing petticoats and smiled a smile of quiet rapture. Above her decolletage, as bare as a lie and as bold as fashion, sparkled a small cascade of diamonds—or what looked like diamonds. Her slender, black-gloved hand gripped a black cigarette holder from which, now & again, she flicked a trace of ash with gracious disdain. A man's voice cooed to her.
"Just enjoy the whole thing," said the man. "Now let's have some major action here, some minor action there . . . That's quite good . . . Go on now, really moving . . . Go right on . . . Yes, yes . . . let the action transfer to the whole body . . . Relax the shoulders . . . Hollow the chest . . . That's wonderful, wonderful! . . ." The voice became slightly breathless with excitement : "Now just gently . . . close your mouth please . . . Go on now, really moving . . . Yes, yes, YES! . . . That's so beautiful. . ."
This passionate effusion was punctuated by the constant, brittle click of a camera. The ecstatic monologuist was Vogue's talented photographer Irving Penn and the woman in white was his model. Well might Penn be ecstatic. In that strange, floodlit world whose heaven is Paris and whose economic life force is the American woman's checkbook, his model was a reigning queen. She was Lisa Fonssagrives, the highest-paid, highest-praised high-fashion model in the business, considered by many of her colleagues the greatest fashion model of all time. Says Photographer Horst Paul Horst, who helped her get started: "She has one of the most beautiful bodies I have ever seen."
While Penn chattered on, Lisa continued in her uncomfortable but graceful pose, looking as though some preposterous comedy plot compelled her to be completely at ease while leaning against an exceedingly hot stove. Thus for about four hours, model and photographer labored over a picture, which had but one purpose: to convince as many women magazine readers as possible that they could look just like Lisa Fonssagrives in Hattie Carnegie's new creation.
New Look, Old Hat. The flood of such pictures in magazines and newspapers was strategically timed. It would coincide with the climax of the American woman's familiar rite, already well under way last week —the annual surrender to the fall fashions.
The New Look was already old hat. The great wheel of fashion was turning onward from the bustling '90s to the tubular '20s: the new line was boyish and slim. U.S. dressmakers had lifted skirts closer to the knees. Paris houses showed short, narrow evening gowns with huge, trainlike attachments and bathing suit tops. There was a host of minor gimmicks: the boyish haircut, jagged at the edges; the sleek "attenuated siren look"; huge black fur muffs; long umbrellas; Edwardian gloves; the lacquered evening "back-of-the-head bandeau"; Eton collars; the coal scuttle; the Picasso bicorne.