Alexander Liberman, the editorial director of Condé Nast through most of the second half of the twentieth century, asked Peter Lindbergh a question. Lindbergh had told him, in plain terms, that he could not stand the kind of woman American Vogue kept putting in front of him. Over-styled, heavily made up, surrounded by limousines and small dogs, supported by a rich husband. Liberman, who had heard this complaint before but never from someone he wanted to hire, asked Lindbergh to show him what he meant instead.

Lindbergh picked the stylist Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, who liked gold Rolexes and serious jewellery and was therefore the wrong person for the job on paper. He told her not to worry about the clothes. Just bring some white shirts. He picked six models he liked at the moment: Estelle Lefébure, Karen Alexander, Rachel Williams, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz, and Christy Turlington. None of them was famous yet. He flew the whole group to Los Angeles and put them on the beach at Santa Monica.

What he produced was almost nothing. Six women in oversized men's shirts, mostly unbuttoned, almost no makeup, hair left to do what the wind did. Bare feet. Underwear, where you could see it. Black and white. They were laughing in some frames and looking past the camera in others. There were no clothes to sell because the only clothes were borrowed shirts.

He brought the prints back to New York and laid them out on a table in front of Liberman and the then-editor Grace Mirabella. In his telling years later, the two of them looked at each other and said little. The pictures were not what anyone had asked for, because the brief had been so vague it could not have been. They ran in the August 1988 issue of American Vogue. Within eighteen months, Lindbergh was working with the same group in different combinations, sometimes adding Naomi Campbell, sometimes Cindy Crawford, until in January 1990 he shot the British Vogue cover that everybody now reaches for when they want to date the start of the supermodel era. The Versace finale in Milan eighteen months after that was the same idea staged with music.

The Santa Monica picture is the one that gets less credit because it ran before anyone knew what they were looking at. There is no front-page narrative attached to it, no music video, no runway moment. It is a magazine spread that happened to contain six women whose names did not yet matter, in a setting that contained nothing else, photographed by someone who had spent his career arguing that the clothes were a pretext and the woman was the point. The thesis was the picture; the picture was the thesis. Everything that followed in the next six years, the big-haired Versace catwalks, the George Michael Freedom! '90 video, the perfume contracts, the trademarked first names, started here and worked outward from a shoreline.

What is strange in hindsight is how thin the apparatus around it was. No production designer, no celebrity, no set, almost no clothes. A photographer who had argued his way into a magazine he didn't like and a stylist who agreed, against her own instinct, to leave the jewellery in the case. The picture they made together did not announce itself. The supermodel decade walked out of it slowly, like the tide going back.

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