Steven Meisel

Begin with the earring: a fat orange disc, lacquered and hollowed at its centre, pressed against the model’s jaw like a curtain ring wrenched from its rod. It is the loudest object in a picture otherwise tuned to cool blues and blacks, and once you have clocked it the whole construction reorganises around its impertinence. Steven Meisel builds these images the way a set designer builds a room, every prop a decision, and here the choice is to let one cheap circle of colour carry the charge the styling keeps in check.

The rest is a study in surfaces pretending to be other surfaces. Strawberry-blonde hair is curled into a 1960s flip and lit until it flares pink at the crown; a transparent PVC bodice lies over a black strapless corset so the plastic reads as a second, colder skin, catching light in milky smears across the sternum. She tips her head back against a black wire grid and a magenta cushion, eyes rimmed in charcoal, mouth a wet coral. Nothing is candid. Everything is placed, and the placement is the argument.

This is the directorial mode Meisel has practised across decades of Vogue Italia covers, where the fashion picture becomes a stage for quoting a period rather than reporting it; the flip, the graphic jewellery and the retro-futurist plastics all cite the 1960s while refusing nostalgia. The archival pigment print holds that register precisely, the tonal slide from pale sky ground to the black lattice, the earring’s orange sitting proud without bleeding. It is an object built to reward the same slow looking the styling demands.