Peter Lindbergh spent much of 1986 on the beaches of Le Touquet with Azzedine Alaïa, shooting what would become some of the most enduring fashion photographs of the decade. The pairing made a strange kind of sense. Lindbergh — six feet tall, German, obsessed with cinema — and Alaïa — five-two, Tunisian-born, obsessed with the body beneath the fabric. They reportedly worked together so naturally that they barely needed to speak. Lindbergh's phrase for it was blunt: "hand in glove."

The Le Touquet sessions produced a body of work that Taschen eventually published in 2021, alongside an exhibition at the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa in Paris. Linda Spierings featured heavily. So did Tatjana Patitz, who was twenty years old and already possessed of the kind of face that made photographers forget their shot lists.

There's a particular frame from that Le Touquet session that I keep returning to. Patitz in a dark fur coat pulled up around her head like a hood, leather gloves held loosely against her chest, eyes locked on the lens. No backdrop except overcast sky. No props. The coat becomes architecture. The gloves become punctuation. Patitz just stands there and lets the whole composition resolve around her face.

What strikes me about it — and about Lindbergh's work generally from this period — is how little it relies on beauty in the conventional fashion-photography sense. He wasn't lighting Patitz to look flawless. He was lighting her to look present. The grain is visible. The tonal range is compressed into a narrow band of silver and charcoal. There's no retouching softness, no diffusion. Just skin and fur and the flat northern light of the Pas-de-Calais coast.

Alaïa understood something similar about clothing. His designs weren't meant to distract from the wearer — they were meant to disappear into the wearer's silhouette. A black coat on a grey beach in a black-and-white photograph. Three layers of reduction, each one stripping away something unnecessary until what remains is a woman looking directly at you from forty years ago with an expression that hasn't dated at all.

Both Lindbergh and Alaïa are gone now. The Fondation keeps Alaïa's archive on Rue de la Verrerie. Lindbergh's son Benjamin curated the 2021 exhibition. The work outlasts everyone involved in making it, which is the only kind of permanence fashion ever really gets.