Lisa Fonssagrives, born Lisa Birgitta Bernstone was a Swedish fashion model widely credited with having been the first supermodel. An icon and leading fashion model in the 1940’s and 50’s, it is difficult to imagine the history of fashion photography without thinking of Lisa Fonssarives-Penn. Long before Gisele Bündchen, Cindy Crawford, or Linda Evangelista ruled the runways, fashion was held in the sway of the very first supermodel, Lisa Fonssagrives. Born in Sweden, in 1911, Fonssagrives was already a trained dancer and sculptor before having her photos taken by Horst P. Horst in 1936. “Fonssagrives’s preternaturally elegant, patrician air and skill with movement and understanding of her body made her a natural in front of the camera, and soon image-makers from Horst to Man Ray to Richard Avedon were lining up to shoot her.” A regular in the pages of Vogue, Fonssagrives’s most important collaboration in both art and life was her relationship with fashion photographer Irving Penn, whom she met on set in 1947 and would eventually marry. Horst P. Horst (born Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann) was one of the towering figures of 20th century fashion photography. Best known for his work with Vogue—who called him “photography’s alchemist”—Horst rose to prominence in Paris in the interwar years, publishing his first work with the magazine in 1931. In the decades that followed, Horst’s experimentations with radical composition, nudity, double exposures, and other avant-garde techniques would produce some of the most iconic fashion images ever, like Mainbocher Corset and Lisa with Harp (both 1939). As The New York Times once described, “Horst tamed the avant-garde to serve fashion.” Though associated most closely with fashion photography, Horst captured portraits of many of the 20th century’s brightest luminaries, dabbling with influences as far-ranging as Surrealism and Romanticism. “I like taking photographs, because I like life,” he once said. “And I love photographing people best of all, because most of all I love humanity.”