Wealth photographs itself best in borrowed clothes. Here a woman got up in the full plumage of the seventies, bouffant hair, a swirl of turquoise knit, brown flares breaking over pointed heels, sits enthroned on a gilt settee in a room that predates her look by two centuries. A Persian rug spreads underfoot and an orchid stands on the low table. Behind her hang old-master portraits of other women, dim and oil-dark, and the picture invites the very comparison it also mocks.
The colour is the argument. Meisel lets the period palette turn faintly sour, the turquoise a touch chemical against the blue damask walls, the paisley handbag a small riot of pattern in a room otherwise composed for dynastic calm. A brown fur slips from one shoulder, accessory to a woman dressed expressly to be looked at. She has arrived as costume in a house of inheritance, and the collision is the subject: new money’s confidence trying on old money’s furniture.
What lifts it past pastiche is the model’s face, which gives nothing away. She meets us with the flat, appraising look of someone who knows precisely what she is worth today and suspects it will not transfer to the wall of portraits above. This is fashion photography thinking about class and seduction and the short shelf life of glamour, and declining to resolve any of them. Printed as archival pigment, the hues keep their deliberate synthetic edge. The old paintings will outlast her, and she seems, coolly, to know it.
Wealth photographs itself best in borrowed clothes. Here a woman got up in the full plumage of the seventies, bouffant hair, a swirl of turquoise knit, brown flares breaking over pointed heels, sits enthroned on a gilt settee in a room that predates her look by two centuries. A Persian rug spreads underfoot and an orchid stands on the low table. Behind her hang old-master portraits of other women, dim and oil-dark, and the picture invites the very comparison it also mocks.
The colour is the argument. Meisel lets the period palette turn faintly sour, the turquoise a touch chemical against the blue damask walls, the paisley handbag a small riot of pattern in a room otherwise composed for dynastic calm. A brown fur slips from one shoulder, accessory to a woman dressed expressly to be looked at. She has arrived as costume in a house of inheritance, and the collision is the subject: new money’s confidence trying on old money’s furniture.
What lifts it past pastiche is the model’s face, which gives nothing away. She meets us with the flat, appraising look of someone who knows precisely what she is worth today and suspects it will not transfer to the wall of portraits above. This is fashion photography thinking about class and seduction and the short shelf life of glamour, and declining to resolve any of them. Printed as archival pigment, the hues keep their deliberate synthetic edge. The old paintings will outlast her, and she seems, coolly, to know it.