Steven Meisel

A second before the lipstick touches down, the mouth is already arranged for it, lips loose, jaw slack, the whole face gone patient in the way faces only go when a mirror is doing the watching. Two Lindas share the frame: the one with her bare back to us, shoulder blades and a thin black strap, and the one she is assembling in the glass, the tube raised like a small conductor’s baton about to cue the day.

What wins me over is the unglamour of the glamour, the backstage machinery left running in plain view. A second hand reaches in from off-frame to fuss the hair; the reflection reads sharper than the woman herself, which is either a trick of focus or a quiet thesis about which Linda is the real one. She is sitter and stylist at once, subject and technician, and the picture keeps a straight face about the joke while letting us in on it.

This belongs to the private theatre of the dressing table, that odd genre where a face is a work in progress and we are permitted to watch it being built. Meisel, who turned models into the era’s true movie stars, films the ritual with real tenderness rather than mockery. Printed in archival pigment, the greys stay supple, the black strap goes deep, the mirror runs a shade colder than the room around it. The finished mouth is coming, red no doubt though we are given only greys; he halts us in the sweeter, unfinished instant just short of it.