Steven Meisel American, b. 1954

A gilded salon at the Ritz, panelled in pale grey-blue boiserie, the kind of room that exists to confer status on whoever enters it. Lamplight pools at either end like footlights; a faded Aubusson tapestry hangs dead-centre above a pink damask sofa with heavy bullion fringe, and a single glass of red catches the glow on the marble side table. Meisel composes the whole space as a proscenium, perfectly symmetrical, and then lets one element break it. Kristen McMenamy reclines across the seat, nude but for a black jewelled headdress, her arms thrown back over the pillows, a single mule still on one foot. The pair of white slides abandoned on the carpet does the work a stylist's caption never could.

What makes the picture contemporary, and not merely a fashion lie about luxury, is the way it withholds the clothes entirely and keeps the room. The genre cues of the boudoir tableau are all present, the marble table, the lone glass of red, but the sitter refuses the languor the staging asks of her. She meets the camera flatly, almost bored, and that small refusal converts an erotic scene into a study of how such scenes are built.

McMenamy was Meisel's defining muse of the early nineties, and 1993 is exactly the moment he was dismantling the decade's gloss from inside the glossiest magazines. This image belongs to that pivot: opulence quoted rather than sold, the tableau held up for inspection. A constructed picture that knows it is one, and trusts the viewer to see the seams.