Ladies, we’ve all had those moments when the air gets stale beneath our petticoats and we could go for a good “Seven Year Itch” subway grate moment. Get the air moving about a bit. But this is too much. Maybe model Lisa Fonssagrives was having a good braided hair day, a good make-up day, and wanted to get out and show her dress off. That, I get. Sometimes your hair is so on point that it demands social activity.
But hit the pubs, the restaurants, the gardens, perhaps the part of the Eiffel Tower that touches the ground. Maybe that was her intention. But then photographer Erwin Blumenfeld arrived on the scene.
And he said, “Just hear me out here, but I was thinking … What if you scaled the girders of the tower in your billowy Lucian Lelong dress–which is totally not a hazard in any way–sans harness, and just sort of hung on by one hand? Sound good?”
And she was all, “Why not?”
Badda-bing, badda-boom, the precursor to our current dangerous, extreme selfie culture.
Somehow, Lisa lived to the age of 80, not falling off a Parisian tower. She described herself as a “good clothes hanger.”
I Don't Get It 
A “good clothes hanger”. What a delightful comment. So unlike the egomania of today’s models. Is that pic for real? I wonder if it isn’t faked like that iconic picture of the workers sitting on a girder way above the streets. I mean that expanse of fabric in a wind could have turned Mlle Fonssagrives into a good hang glider.
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The caption was saying that that was a time and fashion in the late thirties and early forties where they were experimenting with fashion in dangerous ways, so the book said that it was real. I can’t imagine risking your life like that. Don’t even tell me that the workers on the girder is a lie! I always just imagined them scooting down one by one with their lunches.
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Maybe. https://www.rd.com/culture/lunch-atop-a-skyscraper-secrets/
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Interesting! I guess we will never know for sure.
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Yikes! That photograph strikes terror into me just looking at it.
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What was she thinking?
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I am imagining “paycheck” but it would not be enough for me no matter the figure.
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Agreed. I don’t think I’d go 40 feet up in the air for $50,000, much less however many stories she’s scaled. I guess they didn’t have signs and rules back then like they do now.
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Be still the foolish butterflies in my stomach, we won’t be attempting that climb. Zoiks!
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Doesn’t it seem like maybe just one floor up would have been plenty?
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Would have worked for me.
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If you look carefully you can see some guy on the ground looking up her skirt.
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Truth.
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The hills are alive ……………….
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Exactly!
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