ENDIVE, one placard announces in thick brushed capitals, its price looped underneath by hand in old francs. Another sign offers the baguette; a third climbs into three figures. These are the honest hieroglyphics of a Paris market, and Meisel has staged his fashion picture directly beneath them, among crates of wild mushrooms and blanched white stalks, as if couture might be sold here by the kilo.
The seduction is total and slightly absurd. Christy Turlington stands among the produce, crowned like an Arcimboldo figure: a wreath of grapes, berries and pale twigs sprouts from her head, a basket of fruit hangs at her hip on a chain, and one white-gloved hand reaches out to the boxes of cèpes as if to shop. The photograph wants us to believe that beauty belongs in the ordinary marketplace, dressed as its own bounty. We know it is a costume, an editorial conceit, and we surrender anyway, because the joke is elegant and the reaching gesture is real.
This is Meisel the master of pastiche, quoting the whole tradition of fashion in the street, the market reportage of an earlier era, and pushing it toward comedy. He photographed every Vogue Italia cover from 1988 to 2015 and could summon any decade’s manner on command; here the manner is documentary, the subject pure invention. Printed later as an archival pigment print, the picture keeps the grease-pencil blacks of the signs and the granular texture of the mushroom heaps, so the fiction stays grounded in a real morning at market.
ENDIVE, one placard announces in thick brushed capitals, its price looped underneath by hand in old francs. Another sign offers the baguette; a third climbs into three figures. These are the honest hieroglyphics of a Paris market, and Meisel has staged his fashion picture directly beneath them, among crates of wild mushrooms and blanched white stalks, as if couture might be sold here by the kilo.
The seduction is total and slightly absurd. Christy Turlington stands among the produce, crowned like an Arcimboldo figure: a wreath of grapes, berries and pale twigs sprouts from her head, a basket of fruit hangs at her hip on a chain, and one white-gloved hand reaches out to the boxes of cèpes as if to shop. The photograph wants us to believe that beauty belongs in the ordinary marketplace, dressed as its own bounty. We know it is a costume, an editorial conceit, and we surrender anyway, because the joke is elegant and the reaching gesture is real.
This is Meisel the master of pastiche, quoting the whole tradition of fashion in the street, the market reportage of an earlier era, and pushing it toward comedy. He photographed every Vogue Italia cover from 1988 to 2015 and could summon any decade’s manner on command; here the manner is documentary, the subject pure invention. Printed later as an archival pigment print, the picture keeps the grease-pencil blacks of the signs and the granular texture of the mushroom heaps, so the fiction stays grounded in a real morning at market.