Steven Meisel American, b. 5/06/1954

Three women at a restaurant table, and on the table — this is the part nobody forgets — plates of pasta. Two bowls of spaghetti, a dish of something with a bread roll beside it, four glasses of red wine, white linen. One woman leans across the table towards us on both forearms; one stands behind it, bent forward in a black bra; one sits at the right in a dark ruffled robe, stockinged legs crossed, a jewelled pendant at her throat. Pearls all round. Behind them a mirrored wall dissolves into blur, and a fur throw slumps in the foreground.

It is the key picture of the June 2011 Vogue Italia, the issue given over to curve models, and the pasta is doing an enormous amount of work for a plate of carbohydrate. The joke is obvious — here are the bodies fashion said no to, and here is the food fashion said no to, and both are being enjoyed in public — and Meisel commits to it with such conviction that the obviousness stops being a problem. Polemics don't have to be subtle. They have to be photographed well, which this is.

What I like is that nobody is actually eating. The wine has been poured and barely touched, the spaghetti sits in its bowl unwound, and all three look out at us instead, waiting. The meal is a prop in a picture about appetite, which is not at all the same as a picture of people having lunch — and the fur in the foreground, put there to interrupt our view of the table, makes sure we know it.