There was a season when fashion wanted a plot, and so it built rooms: here, a bibliophile’s library whose shelves of dark bindings rise past the top of the frame, and a rolling ladder propped against them. Into this temple of patient reading Meisel has hung Linda Evangelista upside down along the ladder, bare ankles crossed on a rung, spine arched, head thrown back so that her smile arrives inverted. In one raised hand she holds an open book aloft, as if gravity, and reading itself, had been suspended for the joke.
I try to take in the whole tableau: the pale two-seat sofa, the round chair upholstered in leopard spots, the framed still life leaning against the shelves, the riveted steel column holding down the right edge. And yet my attention keeps sliding away from all of it, toward the open book held out into empty air, its pages the only bright white in the room. That small white rectangle undoes the library’s gravity. Everything solemn in the picture is there to be contradicted by it.
The comedy is exact. A woman reads standing on her head in a room built for reverence, and the whole apparatus of learning becomes a set for her lightness. Meisel, who photographed every Vogue Italia cover from 1988 to 2015 and made his models into actors, stages wit the way others stage glamour. Printed later as an archival pigment print, the picture holds its deep library grays and that single flare of paper, and the inverted smile keeps its impudence intact.
There was a season when fashion wanted a plot, and so it built rooms: here, a bibliophile’s library whose shelves of dark bindings rise past the top of the frame, and a rolling ladder propped against them. Into this temple of patient reading Meisel has hung Linda Evangelista upside down along the ladder, bare ankles crossed on a rung, spine arched, head thrown back so that her smile arrives inverted. In one raised hand she holds an open book aloft, as if gravity, and reading itself, had been suspended for the joke.
I try to take in the whole tableau: the pale two-seat sofa, the round chair upholstered in leopard spots, the framed still life leaning against the shelves, the riveted steel column holding down the right edge. And yet my attention keeps sliding away from all of it, toward the open book held out into empty air, its pages the only bright white in the room. That small white rectangle undoes the library’s gravity. Everything solemn in the picture is there to be contradicted by it.
The comedy is exact. A woman reads standing on her head in a room built for reverence, and the whole apparatus of learning becomes a set for her lightness. Meisel, who photographed every Vogue Italia cover from 1988 to 2015 and made his models into actors, stages wit the way others stage glamour. Printed later as an archival pigment print, the picture holds its deep library grays and that single flare of paper, and the inverted smile keeps its impudence intact.