Bruce Weber American, b. 29/3/1946

A young man sits on a wooden folding stool with his knees drawn up, wearing a plain white T-shirt and white briefs, one hand pressed flat against the side of his face so that it covers his eyebrow and most of his cheek. A grey sweatshirt is bundled across his lap. Slouched white socks bunch at his ankles, the waistband and the sock cuff both carrying the label. Behind him, a vine of glossy leaves runs down a white wall; a second stool sits empty at the left.

Calvin Klein, California, 1986. This is an advertisement, and it declines to advertise. The garments are the cheapest things a company can sell and the picture treats them as beside the point, which was precisely the strategy: underwear photographed with the seriousness of portraiture until the underwear became the portrait. The hand over the face does the work. It is a gesture of boredom or of hiding, and either way it withholds.

The eighties are all over this frame, and not in the way people remember them. No shoulder pads, no neon, none of the decade's noise: just a boy, a stool and a slack sock, shot in daylight on a patio. Weber built an entire visual vocabulary out of that restraint, and by the end of the decade every catalogue in America was borrowing it. Look at what it sold, though. Not clothing. A season of somebody's life.