Steven Meisel

A diamond starburst clamped between her teeth, marquise stones biting back at her lower lip: Christy Turlington decides, in 1989, that jewelry is something you devour. The gesture is pure provocation and pure control, and it organizes the whole frame — the white fox slipping off one shoulder, the forearm of stacked cuffs, the wide gold watch riding her wrist as she folds onto the tobacco leather of an open convertible. Behind her, New York dissolves to silver haze. She is not wearing the glamour. She is eating it.

Steven Meisel knew exactly what he had. This is the decade he was busy inventing — the supermodel, the Vogue Italia cover as event, the face as currency — and Turlington was among the surest faces he had to bet on. The high, chalky tonality flirts with fifties studio portraiture, but nothing here is nostalgic; the wit is too cool, the appetite too modern. Watch the hands, because he did: fingers pressed flat to the cheekbone, the other hovering near the brooch, undecided between swallowing and spitting it out. Her eyes stay level above it all, amused, unhurried, entirely the one running the room.

Made for the page and built to outlast it, this survives now as an archival pigment edition of seventeen — a sitting that has migrated, with no loss of charge, from the newsstand to the wall.