Steven Meisel

Brigitte Bardot kept getting into the room before Carla Bruni did. The blonde fringe, the kohl-rimmed pout, the boudoir torpor of a French film still — Meisel cues all of it, then sharpens the reference until it cuts. Above the headboard hangs a gilt-framed Madonna and Child, an Old Master softening in the dark, and beneath that altarpiece Bruni sits on a wrecked bed clutching not an infant but a white cat, pressed to her bare chest, its head tucked under her chin. The sacred and the feline trade places. It is the wittiest blasphemy in the frame, and Meisel lets it sit there without a wink.

She is the whole production, this picture, and she knows it. Knees up, one leg fallen open, slip rucked to the thigh, she stares the lens down with a flat, unbothered insolence — not seduction so much as appraisal, as if she's deciding whether you're worth the trouble. Around her the suite does its expensive theater: crystal sconce dripping its prisms, a fat gilt commode, a white telephone within reach for whoever she might or might not call. The light is grey Paris daylight off the curtains, doing all the work no studio strobe could fake.

Meisel, the most studied stylist of his generation and the man who made the supermodel era look like its own oil paintings, built his pictures from old movies and museum walls, and Bruni — model first, chanteuse and première dame later — was his ideal collaborator: a face that already knew its own myth. Print this large and the bedsheets turn to weather, the cat to a smudge of pure white, and the borrowed Bardot dissolves into something colder and more knowing, entirely Bruni's.