Steven Meisel American, b. 5/06/1954

Two photographs share this room and only one of them is working. On the wall behind the sofa a surfer drops into the barrel of a wave, blown up large and captioned HURLEY INTERNATIONAL — the plain honest labour of an advertisement. Below it Daria Werbowy has arranged herself along a plaid daybed in opera gloves and patent thigh boots, a chain slung across her hip, as though the showroom were a boudoir and the boards angled into the frame were so much furniture. Meisel lets the two argue: the wave is velocity held still against its will; she is stillness chosen.

The setting is the joke and the argument both. Blackletter runs along the board in the foreground — BILLABONG, Hurley — the gothic lettering surf brands borrowed from tattoo parlours; the panelling and tartan belong to a Californian rec room, not a studio. Into it Meisel drops fashion's most theatrical vocabulary: ruffled black tulle, the gloves, boots polished to the only true black in the frame. Nothing is reconciled. Couture arrives as a visitor and declines to change clothes.

Werbowy was barely into her career in 2003, and the picture already knows what it has: a face that concedes nothing while looking straight down the lens, chin lowered onto a gloved forearm, hair lifted and lit from the window at the left. Meisel had spent two decades assembling the machinery behind images like this one and could afford to leave the seams showing — the caption, the brand marks, the unremarkable panelling. In black and white the surf shop's commerce and the model's expensive cool are quoted at the same rate.