Bruce Weber American, b. 29/3/1946

The sitter is a golden retriever named Skye, shot in three-quarter profile against a plain grey studio ground, mouth open in what any dog person reads as pleasure and any editor reads as a smile. On top sits a black bicorne carrying a fully rigged sailing ship: masts, ratlines, sails set and furled, a bowsprit reaching out past the muzzle, and a small silver figure riding the brim like a masthead ornament. It is a Philip Treacy hat, and nothing in the way it is lit suggests a joke.

That is exactly the pleasure of it. Treacy's nineties millinery was architecture more than clothing, wildly unwearable, built for the page rather than the street. Putting one on a retriever ought to puncture the whole enterprise, and instead it exposes how much of fashion's grandeur has always depended on the composure of whoever carries it. Skye's composure is total: chin up, gaze off to the right, entirely untroubled by the frigate. Weber lights the ruff along that chest the way a portraitist lights sable, and the grey ground does the rest.

Dogs have run through Weber's editorial work for decades, and they are both his signature and his alibi, the thing that lets a picture be lavish without being cold. This one arrives at the end of a decade when the fashion image was working hard at hardness, and it declines the assignment. The hat cost a fortune. The sitter is having a considerably better time than most of the faces in the magazines that season, and the picture knows it.