Steven Meisel

We are out under a chestnut tree in a Paris park, an allée of trunks receding into a bright bleached haze, the leaves hanging low enough to brush a hat. Two women in black have arranged themselves on either side of the central trunk, back to back, as though sharing a column. One faces left, one right; both wear tailored jackets, knee-length skirts, pointed heels strapped at the ankle, and hats you could not possibly walk far in.

There is something comic and a little melancholy in the arrangement. The trunk does the work a studio wall usually does, except it also drops dappled light across the black wool and glints off the jet fringe spilling from the right-hand hat. You begin to invent the situation: two women who have quarrelled and can only face away, or simply the oldest joke in fashion, that elegance always looks slightly stranded outdoors. The pointed shoes press into bare earth scattered with fallen leaves, couture on a country walk gone wrong in the best way.

The models are Kristen McMenamy and Linda Evangelista, and Meisel has cast them less as clothes-horses than as characters in a wordless film. He photographed every Vogue Italia cover from 1988 to 2015 and could ventriloquise any past style; this one nods to the mannered garden portraits of an older Paris, all veiled hats and formal allées, then tips into comedy. Printed later as an archival pigment print, the picture keeps the silvery flicker of backlit leaves and the depth of the two black suits, so the scene stays both grand and quietly absurd.