Steven Meisel - beautiful backlit picture of Sandra Bullock - lighting setup - US Vogue

Do you really think it's light coming from the sides in the B/W picture with Christy Turlington? I actually think it's just a very strong backlight wrapping the subject probably thanks to the v-flat you were mentioning, thus winding up in the front too

Instead in the Sandra Bullock picture I would bet some kind of rectangular softbox was used together with a reflector below (creating some kind of frontal "clamshell" frontal light), it seems quite directional too compared to the BW picture.