Steven Meisel

Everything is keyed to a single white, the laced satin of a woman’s corset cinched over a man’s bare back, its suspender straps hanging loose against pale skin and paler legs. That white is echoed all through the room: the tall window’s daylight, the broad drum of the lampshade, the ribs of a cast-iron radiator, the mat of a framed print. Against it the dark cabinet, the small horse-head carving and the spines of stacked books supply the picture’s few firm blacks.

Meisel photographs the figure from directly behind, so we read the scene the way the man does, out toward the window and the building beyond. The vantage is the wit of it: a fashion editor caught from the rear in borrowed lingerie, barefoot on a herringbone parquet floor, at home among his books. The composition is domestic, the verticals of window mullion and cabinet holding the frame square, the soft window light modelling the spine and shoulder blades with an almost documentary plainness. Nothing leers; the strangeness is stated plainly.

The subject is Hamish Bowles, and the portrait turns a private dandyism into something funny and tender, a study of a man entirely at ease in a costume convention says is not his. Meisel, who photographed every Vogue Italia cover from 1988 to 2015, knew the codes of fashion well enough to play with them like this. Printed later as an archival pigment print, the image keeps its domestic range, from the glare of the window to the deep black of the cabinet, so the white corset stays luminous and the quiet scene holds together.