What Gisele Sees in the Mirror

Steven Meisel had an idea. For the December 2009 issue of Italian Vogue, he staged a series of photographs called "Meiselpic"—Gisele Bündchen, Abbey Lee, Naomi Campbell, and others caught in staged domestic moments: posing before mirrors half-dressed, eating bananas with their gaze elsewhere, smoking on balconies in full evening wear. The captions spoke of new breasts, red lips, the small pleasure of not being watched.

The conceit was Twitter—or rather the behavior Twitter had normalized, the idea that a woman photographing herself in a state of undress and broadcasting it was something between self-expression and performance art. Lindsay Lohan had posted topless photos and the internet briefly lost its mind. Now Meisel was pointing the same lens at the most photographed faces alive and asking what it means when the image never stops.

The fashion world received this with the ecstatic swooning it reserves for things that already confirm what it believes. But the photographs themselves are genuinely interesting—there’s something disquieting about women paid to be looked at staging the private act of looking at themselves. Whether Meisel was critiquing the culture or decorating it is a question the images don’t answer, and I like them better for it.

The ripple effect, predictably, was every woman with a dirty mirror and a smartphone feeling newly authorized to point both at herself and share the result with the planet. I’m not complaining. Not even a little.