“It is always the dress; it is never, never the girl. I’m just a good clothes hanger,” said Lisa Fonssagrives in a 1949 article in Time magazine. She was born Lisa Bernstone in Uddevalla, Sweden, on May 17, 1911. Her father was a dentist and her mother a dressmaker who encouraged Lisa to study art and ballet. Not much else is known about the early life of this Swedish beauty.

Lisa was pursuing a dancing career in Paris when she met and married Fernand Fonssagrives, a dancer, in 1935. In the early 1930s, Fernand turned to photography and sold photos of Lisa frolicking on the French coast to European magazines.

Lisa entered fashion’s big time in 1936 when Horst P. Horst was commissioned to do test shots of her for Paris Vogue. Pictures of Lisa appeared in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, and after moving to the United States with her husband in 1939, she worked both as both a model and photographer.

Lisa’s image appeared on the cover of many magazines during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, including Town & Country, LIFE, and the original Vanity Fair. She worked with the most famous photographers of the age, including George Hoyningen-Huene, Man Ray, Horst, Erwin Blumenfeld, George Platt Lynes, Richard Avedon, and Edgar de Evia. In the late 1940s, when most models were paid $10 to $25 an hour, Lisa was earning $40 an hour. Most models’ careers ended before their 30th birthdays, but Lisa’s thrived until she was past 40.

Lisa’s early ballet training gave her the grace and poise for which she was renowned. Perhaps the most famous photograph of Lisa was taken by Erwin Blumenfeld, who took advantage of her dancer’s strength and agility by photographing her leaning out from the Eiffel Tower, skirts billowing in the wind.

In 1950, Lisa married Irving Penn (after divorcing Fonssagrives) and was a frequent subject of Penn’s photographs for Vogue, particularly his studies of French haute couture. Alexander Liberman, the editorial director of Condé Nast Publications, which publishes Vogue, said the Penns represented “an extraordinary relationship between a photographer and a model” and that “she was the inspiration and subject of some of Penn’s greatest photographs.” He went on to add that Lisa “epitomized a very noble period of fashion and couture. She gave a classical dignity to anything she wore.”

After Lisa stopped modeling in the mid-1950s, she designed clothes, at one point doing a collection of leisure wear for Lord & Taylor. She went on to become a respected sculptor in the 1960s, working in marble, bronze, and fiberglass, and was represented by the Marlborough Gallery in Manhattan.

Lisa died at the age of 80 in February 1992, survived by her second husband; her daughter, Mia Fonssagrives-Solow, a sculptor and jewelry designer in New York; her son, Tom Penn, a metal designer, also in New York; and two grandchildren. Today, the glamour of her breath-taking elegance and beauty endures: The Elton John photo auction held by Christie’s in October 2004 sold a 1950 Irving Penn photograph of his wife for $57,360. It seems that Lisa was more than just a good clothes hanger after all.