Bruce Weber American, b. 29/3/1946

Three young men at a hotel pool, all shirtless, all in work trousers and belts. Two share a lounger in the foreground, one reclining with his hands in his lap, the other propped on an elbow; the third stands at the right in narrow trousers and cowboy boots, thumbs hooked at the waistband, hair to his shoulders. Behind them a band of checkerboard tile, a palm, a white balcony, the flat bright light of Florida.

The title works like a magazine caption and it is a joke delivered with a straight face. Nothing here is working class except the wardrobe: the belts, the boots, the trousers that would be filthy by noon on any actual job. This is the machine Weber built and American fashion ran on for fifteen years — take the clothes of labour, put them on beautiful boys at a resort, sell the result as authenticity.

What keeps it from curdling is how open the picture is about the trade. The three are arranged like a band on an album sleeve, they know precisely what they are doing, and they look faintly bored by it, which was the correct expression for the decade. Weber's editorials ran at lengths nobody is granted now, and a page like this is what that space was for: not a garment, a mood you could buy.