Fashion Through the Lens: Irving Penn’s Photography of Issey Miyake at MEP
A new Paris exhibition brings Irving Penn’s fashion work into focus, including a collaboration built on distance, trust and the freedom to reinterpret a garment.
At Paris’s Maison Européenne de la Photographie, PENN & FASHION revisits a career in which a dress could become the beginning of an image’s invention. Within that wider story, Irving Penn’s collaboration with Issey Miyake offers an unusually revealing account of what happens when a designer lets a photographer take the lead.
The exhibition opened on September 30 and runs until January 17, 2027. Curated by Pascal Hoël with Frédérique Dolivet, it traces work made between 1947 and 2008, bringing together material primarily from the MEP and Nicola Erni collections, with loans from the Irving Penn and Miyake Issey foundations. Dior and Balenciaga, later designers and Vogue beauty assignments provide the broader context. The Miyake partnership sits within a sustained investigation of fashion as a photographic subject.
Penn had long understood how much could happen inside a controlled setting. The Irving Penn Foundation describes his 1950 couture assignment in Paris: daylight, an old theatre curtain and Lisa Fonssagrives, whose dance training informed her command of posture. That combination placed real responsibility on the encounter between photographer, model and garment. A pared-back setting asks every angle and gesture to earn its place. The apparent simplicity depends on decisions made with considerable precision.
The working arrangement with Miyake made room for another kind of precision. In her account for 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT, Midori Kitamura recalls taking selected clothes to New York twice a year between 1987 and 1999. Miyake deliberately stayed away from the sittings, believing his absence would give Penn greater freedom. Penn, in turn, never attended an Issey Miyake show. The clothes arrived with Kitamura’s explanations, leaving the photographer to build their new visual circumstances.
Kitamura’s recollection also restores the people around the two famous names. Tyen handled makeup, John Sahag the hair, while Sadie Hall prepared the clothes. Penn selected garments and developed poses, expressions and styling into a coherent story for each sitting. Kitamura then brought the photographs back to Miyake, who found ideas in them for subsequent collections. The process formed a creative loop: clothing generated pictures, and pictures helped generate more clothing.
Miyake’s approach to material gave that loop plenty to work with. His studio’s history describes experiments in garment pleating: oversized pieces were sewn before being placed between paper and heat-pressed into their finished dimensions. Shape and texture emerged together. For a photographer, such work offers a rich problem of translation. A three-dimensional object can alter dramatically with a turn, a fold or a change in the direction of light.
The collaboration also travelled beyond the photograph itself. Miyake Design Studio records more than 250 images collected in seven books. Ikko Tanaka’s layouts and typography turned Penn’s pictures into seasonal posters, giving the clothing another public life through graphic design. The Miyake Issey Foundation’s account of its 2011 Tokyo exhibition records 55 of those posters on display there. That earlier presentation makes the chain of authorship explicit: garment, photographic interpretation, then the designed surface that carries the image.
The physical print deserves similar attention. Penn’s work encompassed gelatin silver, colour and platinum-palladium processes. The Art Institute of Chicago explains how, in his platinum printing, he mounted paper on aluminium to withstand repeated coating and exposure, using registration punches to keep the elements aligned. Tone was something he could construct through successive operations. For visitors, the lesson is to look at the object as well as its subject: the surface and the print process participate in the final image.
For a viewer today, this history suggests a slower way to read fashion photographs. Notice where the pose redirects the clothing, what the backdrop removes, and how cropping changes a body’s apparent proportions. Then consider how many kinds of expertise have converged inside the frame. MEP’s survey gives that looking a broad historical setting. Penn and Miyake make its central question especially vivid: how much imagination can a picture release from something already designed?
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