Café in Lima, 'Vogue' fashion photograph (Jean Patchett), 1948

Classically modest and charming, Café in Lima represents a major turning point in fashion photography at Vogue as well as an important moment in Irving Penn’s illustrious fashion career. Taken only a few years into his time at the magazine, Penn was still developing his signature style and exploring new ways in which to portray the latest fashions to Vogue’s audience. For this spread, Penn and his model traveled to Peru at the suggestion of art director Alexander Liberman, engaging with the culture and day to day life of the region to create a romantic and realistic images filled with a sense of wanderlust.

Similar to his contemporary Richard Avedon, Penn adopted the postwar trend of showing his model unposed while shooting on location in Peru. The model for the image, Jean Patchett, even recalled that the final image was captured while she was entirely off guard saying, 'We flew 3,200 miles and after we got there, a week went by and Mr. Penn still hadn't used his camera. I started getting nervous about it. Every day I got up and got dressed but he never took a picture. Finally one day we found this little café, and there was a young man sitting across from me, and I was getting frustrated. So I just sort of said to myself to heck with this and I picked up my pearls and I kicked off my shoes. My feet were hurting. And he said 'Stop!'' (Angeletti and Oliva, In Vogue, Rizzoli, 2006, p. 147.)

The trip and the resulting images published in the February 1949 issue of Vogue would turn out to be the only fashion story that Penn shot entirely on location during his tenure at the magazine. By 1950, Penn would settle into his sunlit studio sessions that would become a staple of the magazine’s reportage of each season’s newest designer collections. A remnant of the early years of Penn’s career, Café in Lima remains a delightful and iconic image in the history of fashion photography.