“Close your lips. Open just a little, a little more please. Make a different shape.”
—Irving Penn on the set
Illustrated in her book Stoppers: Photographs from My Life at Vogue, Vogue's former Executive Fashion Editor Phyllis Posnick recalled this shoot:
‘For this picture, we had to fly a bee keeper from New Mexico. Bees become docile and harmless when cold, and our bee keeper knew the exact temperature for this state of induced hibernation – he put them in the fridge. Penn remembered that “Bee Stung Lips” had been a popular expression in the 1950s to characterise full, pouty lips. So in 1995, when women started having collagen injected to make their lips fuller, he thought using this idea was a perfect illustration for the Vogue article. Our first task was to find a brave model who had no insect phobias. Estella Warren was fearless and she posed patiently while our wrangler placed one bee after another on her lips. From behind his camera, Penn gave instructions: first he asked her to close her mouth, then open it a little, then a little more. We tried many different bees and Estella made different shapes with her mouth. In fact, she became very playful, and at one point, stuck her tongue out and flicked a bee onto it. When a bee began to warm up under the studio lights, the wrangler quickly substituted a colder one. No photographer or editor or bee was harmed during the shoot. At the end of the day, our bee keeper calmly packed up his colony and took them back home to New Mexico.’
Penn’s mastery over every detail here – the velvety texture of the fluffy bee against the model’s pristinely lined, blush-red lips – encapsulates his quintessential aesthetic and timeless legacy: simple yet effective, elegant yet daringly, unexpected.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC holds another print of this image from the same edition.