Lace in the pines: two friends, one evening

The two women in this story are not professional models but friends who have known each other for ten years, and the brief we gave them was two words: at ease. The place is a clearing in a pine wood in the northern hills; the time is the hour before sunset, when the light comes slanting between the trunks and fine dust hangs in the air.

The clothes are white lace blouses and ankle-length skirts, one brown and one grey-green, of a cut that belongs to no decade in particular. Vintage dressing, our stylist says, is not a matter of reconstructing a period but of proportion: nothing tight, nothing shiny, and so few accessories that all of them would fit in a pocket.

In the five frames they sit side by side and laugh, lean together with their eyes closed and walk hand in hand through tall grass; in between comes the picnic rug seen from above, and last a close portrait with a fern frond. Nobody is posing. It is simply two people spending an evening the way they always have.