Steven Meisel

Somewhere between a Sargent portrait and a Paramount publicity still, this picture pretends to have arrived from about 1932 by first-class carriage. The black bob with its blunt fringe, the tulle skirt slit to the hip, the profile held against warm drawn curtains: all of it belongs to pre-war Hollywood glamour, the era when a woman on a chaise longue was a statement rather than a person. Meisel knows the accent perfectly, which is why the whole thing hums with quotation marks you can almost hear.

The details keep breaking period, and that is the joke. A blue jewelled choker flashes at the throat, too modern-electric for the sepia around it; a black ribbon loops the upper arm like a bandage a stylist forgot to explain. She sits barefoot on oatmeal upholstery, red-lipped, gazing toward a spray of pale sweet peas leaning in from the right as if auditioning for a still life. Nothing is doing anything. That is the luxury being sold, the effort of making idleness look this composed and this dated.

That is Meisel’s genius, if the word survives fashion: he is the medium’s great pasticheur, counterfeiting any decade’s studio manner so cleanly the fake becomes the subject. Having shot every Vogue Italia cover across twenty-seven years, he can conjure a lost world of lighting and pose and then wink at it. The archival pigment print earns its keep by holding the warm tonal wash intact, the tans sliding into shadow without muddying, while the black tulle keeps its densities distinct. A modern object doing a superb impression of an old one.