Steven Meisel

She lifts a hand to her brow and the whole picture tips into performance, the wrist cocked, the fingers grazing that pale explosion of curls. This is Linda Evangelista playing Marilyn, or playing the idea of Marilyn, and the wit is that she lets you watch the playing. The pose is a quotation and she delivers it with a chorus girl’s timing, chin over the bare shoulder, mouth parted, eyes sliding toward us as if we had walked in a beat too early on her number.

The corset is the star turn, satin laced tight up the spine with a scalloped fringe of lace at the hip, and the light does something reckless with it. Everything blows toward white, the background dissolving, the skin nearly the tone of the fabric, so that model and lingerie fuse into one bright column. The laces zigzag down her back like a ladder of little knots, the one crisp graphic note in all that haze. Only the smoked eyes and a soft shadow along her flank keep her from vanishing outright.

Meisel shot every Vogue Italia cover for a quarter century and manufactured supermodels the way old studios minted stars, free to quote any decade’s manner at will. The borrowed decade here is the fifties, cinched and platinum and entirely knowing. Printed as archival pigment, that scorched brightness holds without the highlights curdling, a rendering as poised as the pose. Notice how little of her he keeps in sharp focus, and how completely you supply the rest.