Steven Meisel

In 1999, with a century of images packing to leave, fashion photography chose to exit in costume. Meisel poses Amber Valletta amid the borrowed grandeur of Alder Mansion—olive wall, geometric carpet, a low chair she occupies like a throne—and the gown, green upon green, a printed jungle slit open along the body, carries all the fin-de-siècle appetite for excess. The pose is legislation: knee advanced, elbow planted, chin held level. Sovereignty, photographed at the millennium's edge.

The studium declares itself at once: glamour, leisure, the theatre of a great house. What holds me is smaller. The pearl rings doubled on her fingers; the thin chain dropping its pendant into the dress's open V; the lacquered blonde bob closing around the face like a helmet. Such details do not seduce, they govern. Her gaze admits no appeal and expects none. The mask is total—and the mask, here, is the message.

Yet the long bare legs angling across the frame, the beaded strap of one sandal, the toes pressed into the carpet's pattern: these return the image to the body, to skin set against print and weave. Between armour and flesh the photograph holds its poise, neither warm nor cold—the composure of a century dressing, one last time, for its own farewell.