Marguerite Osei arrives seventeen minutes late to a studio in Ghent wearing a suit that does not belong to her. It belonged, until roughly a year ago, to a retired notary in Antwerp whose widow sold nine of them in a single afternoon. Osei bought four. "The trousers were three sizes wrong," she says, "which is the correct number of sizes wrong."
We are here to photograph her for the fourth issue, and she has arrived with no rack, no assistant and no plan beyond a canvas holdall containing two shirts, a folded silk square and a pair of spectacles she describes, without irony, as load-bearing. The holdall is older than the suit.
"A borrowed jacket makes you stand differently. You are not performing authority. You are just wearing somebody else's confidence until it fits."
Osei has spent eleven years dressing other people — musicians mostly, and one long, complicated season in film — and has developed a working theory that the best wardrobes are assembled by subtraction. She owns 62 garments. She counted them for a magazine in 2023 and has kept the number stable since, on the grounds that a closed system forces better decisions.
The theory extends to colour. There is exactly one red object in her flat, a lacquered tray, and one red garment, the scarf she wears in three of these photographs. Everything else is charcoal, ivory, or the particular soft black that wool goes after four winters. "People think restraint is austerity," she says. "It is the opposite. It means every single thing is a favourite."
By the fifth roll of film the light has gone flat and she has stopped posing, which is when the photographs get good. She sits down heavily in a borrowed chair, folds her hands, and looks at the lens with an expression somewhere between a challenge and a joke. Brandt shoots eleven frames without speaking. Three of them are on this page.
Before she leaves she asks whether the suit reads as a man's. Told that it does, and that it doesn't, she seems pleased. "Good," she says, buttoning it once, wrongly, on purpose. "That's the whole trick."
