LIFE had no fashion photographers when Parks was doing his gang series, so the magazine sent him to Paris to cover the French collections. In Paris, he was swept up into the elegance, beauty and glamour of the fashion houses of Chanel, Dior and Balenciaga, among others. "For me, Paris was a golden time," Parks gushes. "All the beauteous mannequins were there, all of whom graced the pages of the most prestigious fashion magazines. My thoughts, a long way from the cornfields of Kansas, were soon drowning in the worlds of Degas, Matisse, and Renoir." The woman shown here, a contessa, was photographed by Parks in 1950. "She's one of my favorite models.She had a real flare about the way she wore clothes." Unfortunately, there's more to this image than just a beautiful woman wearing beautiful clothes. Parks became ensnared in an argument about the candles used in the photo. "The owner of the apartment came in and saw that we'd lit a bunch of candles for the shot...she was angry because she'd saved those candles for eight years after the war." Parks went back to LIFE and had them pay "something like three thousand dollars to pay for these eight or nine candles, just to appease the irate landlord."