Steven Meisel

How much splendour can a single frame hold before it curdles into excess? Here is a test case. A woman stands sheathed in a pale sage-green gown of pleated and ruffled silk, a structured hood rising behind her head, floral embroidery scattered across the folds, a jewelled cap at her brow. She is pressed into a corner where two painted walls meet, one brown and gold with stylized fruit, the other mauve with enormous poppies, a checkerboard floor tilting away beneath her. Everything competes; nothing yields.

And I confess it wins. The eye, which might tire among many patterns, instead keeps discovering: the cascade of pleats breaking like water down the front, the dark amaranth spilling from an urn at the left, the burgundy rug worked under her feet. Excess here is not vulgarity but an argument, that a photograph can be as densely made as a Renaissance altarpiece and lose nothing by it. The woman holds still at the storm’s centre, faintly imperious, letting clothes and walls do the shouting while she declines to.

Meisel, who photographed every Vogue Italia cover for a quarter-century, is a connoisseur of art history as much as fashion, and this tableau borrows the frontal grandeur of court portraiture to sell a dress. That is what fashion photography has always done, and this one does it without apology. As an archival pigment print the colour is deep and stable, the greens cool, the painted flowers warm, the whole surface lacquered and exact. It does not ask whether such magnificence is justified; it insists, and for the length of a look one is persuaded.