Steven Meisel American, b. 5/06/1954

The pool has been drained for some time. Its walls are blotched with damp, a ladder with white rungs climbs the back wall towards an empty outlet, and dead leaves have gathered where the water used to be. Into this ruin Meisel sends two young men in women's swimsuits and laced high heels. One braces an arm against the wall, a cigarette between his lips, a black maillot slipping from his shoulder and a seamed stocking drawn up one leg; the other, long hair falling across his face, bends to set the fallen strap back in place.

What the picture shows most frankly is work. The second figure is not posing so much as dressing, with the bowed attention of a fitter backstage, and the photograph puts that gesture at its centre, where a fashion image would normally hide it. The clothes are being worn, adjusted, made to sit, and we are shown the adjusting. Even the setting admits its purpose: an empty pool is a place built for bodies in swimsuits, stripped of the water that would have turned it into leisure.

The negative dates from 1987; the print is a later object made from it, in pigment on paper, and the gap between the two is where the picture now lives. Fashion photographs are built to be spent within a season, used on the page and replaced by the next issue. This one outlasted its season and returned as something to be framed and kept, and what it keeps is not the clothes but a practical kindness: one young man fixing another's strap, in a pool with no water in it.