Steven Meisel

Where does a bombshell go on her day off? Somewhere green and unglamorous, apparently — Ward Pound Ridge, the title says — where the benches are splintery and the grass has never been mowed with a close-up in mind. Amber Valletta reclines on weathered boards under an avalanche of platinum hair (a wig? one rather hopes so), in a black tinsel bodice and fishnet tights: the full vamp kit, deployed about as far from a cocktail lounge as it will go.

The joke could have been cheap — a pin-up at a picnic — but nobody here is laughing, least of all Valletta. Meisel keeps things in silvery black and white, lets the hair blaze against the dark grass, and permits one crucial betrayal: freckles. Under all that engineered blondeness sits a bare, level-eyed face, entirely unimpressed by its own costume. I keep going back to the freckles. They admit what the hair denies.

Fashion photography usually asks you to believe in a transformation; this picture shows its seams and is the more seductive for it. The bench, the fishnets, the improbable hair: props for a fantasy the sitter declines to fully inhabit, looking back instead with more patience than the setup deserves. Glamour, it turns out, survives the countryside better than the countryside survives glamour — though I would keep fishnets well away from splinters.