Joel Meyerowitz American, b. 6/3/1938

Two women with bright red hair sit side by side on a straw mat in Central Park, both in mustard-yellow trousers. The one on the left, her hair cut short and held back by a band, sits cross-legged in a navy halter with ropes of big navy beads, turning something small and red between her fingers. The one on the right shows us her bare back: a grey bandeau, a paisley sash at the waist, a string of yellow beads at the nape and a head of tight red curls. They are flanked with perfect symmetry by two white bicycles lying on the grass and two yellow tote bags with a black grid, and in front of them lies a picnic of brown bottles, a thermos and a plastic bag of food.

Behind them the park keeps the pattern going. Two men lean on the same tree trunk from opposite sides, one in a beige shirt, one with a moustache, each with an arm stretched out to the bark like a pair of brackets around the scene. On the path, women in summer dresses stroll past a parked truck, and a boy in a blue shirt walks off towards the right edge. Everything seems to come in twos.

The women have dressed for each other, and the result is better than any stylist's. The yellow of the trousers is picked up by the bags, the navy of the halter by the beads, the red of the hair by nothing at all, because nothing could compete with it. This is the look of 1966 as it was worn rather than modelled: the halters and chunky beads are straight out of the fashion pages, but the bare feet, the bottles and the bicycles belong to a New York summer afternoon. Meyerowitz, working in colour, gets the whole outfit, and the city dressed to match it.