Lisa Fonssagrives

Lisa Fonssagrives

By Ines Mendoza

We have a habit of highlighting the young and beautiful. Yes, we are indeed guilty of occasionally putting boobs and bush ahead of brains or braun. Intelligence, class, glamour and style often takes a backseat to bikini clad sex kittens.

So let's go to the other end of the spectrum, let's check out a lady of class, of esteem : a 100 year old deceased woman!

Born Lisa Birgitta Bernstone in May of 1911 (that's right, over 100 years ago) Lisa Fonssagrives was a classy broad, a Swedish fashion model widely credited as the world's first supermodel.

Raised in Uddevalla as a child, Fonssagrives showed a passion for painting, sculpting and dancing as a youngster at Mary Wigman's school in Berlin (where she also studied art and dance).

It wasn't long before she returned to her home town and opened a dance school of her very own. Not to be contained, Lisa moved from Sweden to Paris where she trained as a ballet dancer (she was rumoured to have participated with choreographer Astrid Malmborg in an international competition) and moonlit as a private dance teacher with Fernand Fonssagrives.

As showbiz law dictates : it's who you know not what you know. So, not surprisingly, the dancing led to a modeling career, which lasted from the 1930s to 1950s in which she featured numerous times in Town & Country, Life, Vogue, the original Vanity Fair, and Time.

But how did this all happen? As the fable goes, while in Paris in 1936, infamous photographer Willy Maywald discovered her in an elevator and asked her to model hats for him. Fonssagrives' photographs were then sent to Vogue, and Vogue photographer Horst took some test photographs of her.

At one point it was reported that Fonssagrives was "the highest paid, highest praised, high fashion model in the business". Not one to be swept up in the lifestyle, Fonssagrives famously described herself as nothing more than a "good clothes hanger".

Lisa also worked with such fashion luminaries as George Hoyningen-Huene, Man Ray, Horst, Erwin Blumenfeld, George Platt Lynes, Richard Avedon, and Edgar de Evia. She even went as far as to marry Parisian photographer Fernand Fonssagrives in 1935, sadly the two divorced (but it wasn't long until she shacked up with another photographer, Irving Penn, whom she married in 1950)

Sadly, all good things must come to an end and Fonssagrives died, aged 80, in New York, survived by her second husband, and her two children: Mia Fonssagrives-Solow and Tom Penn.

However, no matter how beloved she was within the fashion industry, perhaps Lisa Fonssagrives' legacy will live on after it was revealed that the 1001 Dalmations character Cruella de Vil was loosely based on her.

Fashion legend - or most evil woman on earth? Either way, Lisa Fonssagrives never did anything by halves!

Photos : Unknown
Lisa Fonssagrives