Steven Meisel

Almost everything is kept from us here. The body has vanished into a single fall of black cloth that wraps the figure from throat to floor, a dark monolith set in an empty gray studio. No shoulders, no waist, nothing to read as a garment: only a column and, escaping it, a pale face turned back over the wrapped mass to meet the lens, and two bare feet at the hem. The refusal is the design.

It is a wholly directed image, and its wit lies in what it withholds and what it lets slip. From the bottom edge of the black, a small white cat noses out beside one bare foot, a soft bright accident against the severe geometry above. The turn of the head, chin over the wrapped shoulder, eyes level and unsmiling, converts a fashion sitting into a study of self-possession. Meisel builds the whole picture from three tones: the flat gray sweep of the backdrop, the absolute black of the wrap, the white of face, feet and cat.

The sitter is Grace Coddington, and the portrait treats her with the gravity of a monument rather than the flattery of a fashion plate. Meisel, who photographed every Vogue Italia cover from 1988 to 2015 and knew the culture he worked inside, could honor one of its architects by giving her almost nothing to wear and all the authority in the frame. Printed later as an archival pigment print, the image holds its long gray field and seamless black, and the dark column reads as sculpture while the small white cat plays the joke.