Steven Meisel

This was the season when fashion fell for its own melancholy, when downtown decided the future should dress like a Victorian séance. Six young people cluster against a bleached sky and a stand of bare winter trees, wrapped in black velvet, shaggy fur and a panel of white crochet lace at one throat. They are beautiful in the undernourished way the era prized, huddling as if for warmth, or for a portrait none of them quite believes in. The grunge romance is all here, gently mocked by being taken so seriously.

What keeps it from being costume drama is the acting, or the refusal to act. Nobody smiles. A young man at the centre folds his arm across the collarbone of the girl before him, a gesture that could be tenderness or ownership; another leans in from the right with the boneless patience of someone posing for hours. Hands hang heavily, one girl’s fingers laced before her dark dress. The bare branches do the emoting the faces decline, scratching at a sky drained almost to paper.

Meisel, who ran the visual imagination of Vogue Italia for a quarter-century, was a magpie of styles, and here he channels the tribal group portraits of the counterculture, minus the flowers, plus a chill. It should feel dated by now and somehow doesn’t; the mood he bottled keeps coming back. Issued as an archival pigment print, the high-key greys and inky blacks hold the temperature of that winter afternoon, the whole clan pressed into one shivering silhouette. A photograph about belonging to a moment, by the man who decided how the moment looked.