She is off the ground — both boots clear of the dry grass — laughing, in a white suit whose surface is not fabric so much as an infestation of white filaments, a jacket and trousers that appear to be growing outward in every direction. The boots are grey, rubber-soled, absurdly practical. Held against her chest in both hands is a single red poppy. The field is straw-coloured, the sky is doing nothing in particular, and a few dry seed-heads lean in from the right.
The poppy is doing a great deal of work for something that size. It is the only saturated colour in the frame; it is roughly the size of the mouth laughing directly above it; and it is a wildflower, which means that unlike the suit, which cost someone a fortune, it was free and was probably standing in this field five minutes earlier. There is an entire theory of fashion photography available here concerning the couture object and the thing you can simply pick, and I am not going to develop it, because what the picture actually communicates is that jumping is fun.
Which is rarer in this genre than it sounds. Most photographs of extraordinary clothing are photographs of people enduring extraordinary clothing: the face goes blank, the body goes rigid, the garment wins. Here the garment is preposterous and is losing. She has taken a thing designed to make its wearer statuesque and used it to get airborne in a dry field at the end of summer, and the suit — which will look ridiculous in a decade, they always do — is for this one exposure completely justified.
She is off the ground — both boots clear of the dry grass — laughing, in a white suit whose surface is not fabric so much as an infestation of white filaments, a jacket and trousers that appear to be growing outward in every direction. The boots are grey, rubber-soled, absurdly practical. Held against her chest in both hands is a single red poppy. The field is straw-coloured, the sky is doing nothing in particular, and a few dry seed-heads lean in from the right.
The poppy is doing a great deal of work for something that size. It is the only saturated colour in the frame; it is roughly the size of the mouth laughing directly above it; and it is a wildflower, which means that unlike the suit, which cost someone a fortune, it was free and was probably standing in this field five minutes earlier. There is an entire theory of fashion photography available here concerning the couture object and the thing you can simply pick, and I am not going to develop it, because what the picture actually communicates is that jumping is fun.
Which is rarer in this genre than it sounds. Most photographs of extraordinary clothing are photographs of people enduring extraordinary clothing: the face goes blank, the body goes rigid, the garment wins. Here the garment is preposterous and is losing. She has taken a thing designed to make its wearer statuesque and used it to get airborne in a dry field at the end of summer, and the suit — which will look ridiculous in a decade, they always do — is for this one exposure completely justified.