Steven Meisel American, b. 1954

She has pulled the mohair sleeves all the way up over both hands, so that the sweater becomes a pair of soft paws cradling her own face — and the whole picture turns on that gesture, half self-soothing, half armor. The silver ring through her septum catches the only hard glint in an image otherwise dissolved into fuzz and grey London light. Stella Tennant is twenty-two here, an aristocrat's granddaughter with a nose ring and a boy's cropped hair, and Steven Meisel has caught exactly the thing that made her a star: she looks like she wandered in off the street and could not care less whether you photograph her or not.

This is from the 1993 British Vogue sitting that put Tennant on the map — the moment grunge crashed the couture party and Meisel, ever the magazine animal, was first through the door. He knows precisely how much to give you and how much to withhold. The blurred ironwork of the conservatory behind her never resolves; the focus lives entirely in those pale, level eyes, rimmed and slightly smudged, staring you down without a flicker of coquetry. It's a fashion photograph that refuses to flatter and seduces anyway.

Meisel is the most fluent stylist of his generation, the man who could make any decade speak, and his vintage prints from the early nineties are scarce — most of this work lived and died on the magazine page. To see it at this scale, the knit gone almost abstract under her chin, is to watch a face become an era. The pierced ring, the unbothered slouch, the warmth she's wrapped around herself against the cold: it's all attitude, and all tenderness, at once.