This may sound like an updated and urbanized version of ''Girl With a Pearl Earring,'' the best seller and movie that imagined the life story of someone in a Vermeer painting. But Barbara Meyer, the woman the photographer Bruce Davidson snapped on a Brooklyn subway platform 24 years ago, is for real.  Her hair has gone from a dark, almost reddish blonde to a light, almost whitish blonde. And, she said with a chuckle the other day, Mr. Davidson's hair has disappeared. ''He's bald as a cue ball,'' she said.  But that moment when the wind caught her dress? Let Mr. Davidson's memory go unchallenged: ''It wasn't blowing it up around her knees like a Marilyn Monroe picture, it was just fluffing it,'' he said. ''It was a delicate moment.''  She was a 28-year-old financial industry employee on her way home to Ridgewood, Queens, on the M line. Her wait at the Myrtle Avenue-Wyckoff Avenue stop in Bushwick was interrupted by the ca-chunk of Mr. Davidson's shutter. She heard him before she saw him closing in on her.  ''He was about this far away from getting kicked in the teeth -- he was getting a little close,'' she recalled. ''He said, 'It's O.K., I can explain.' He explained it wasn't that I was so fabulous looking, it was that my dress was yellow, the other lady on the platform was in red, my shoes were green. It was the color play, the lighting, the whole mélange.''  The photograph appeared in Mr. Davidson's book, ''Subway,'' which was published in 1986.  And that was that, Ms. Meyer figured when she told the story to a colleague not long ago.  After all, a lot has happened in the last 24 years. She changed jobs a couple of times, and is now a vice president of a firm in Midtown Manhattan that buys and sells trade debt. She lived through the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center, where she worked at the time . ''Even though we were probably 50 floors below where the plane had hit,'' she recalled, ''the walls had buckled and there were beams sticking out.''  But recently the colleague noticed a poster-size image of the photograph in a Madison Avenue store window and realized that the woman on the left had to be Ms. Meyer.  Ms. Meyer did not know that Mr. Davidson's book had been reissued by St. Ann's Press or that photographs from ''Subway'' were on display at Hermès, the Madison Avenue outpost of the Paris fashion house that sells $120 ties and $295 scarves, among other items.  Racing to the store on her lunch hour, Ms. Meyer found herself staring at herself.  ''I was sort of flabbergasted,'' she said last week. ''I haven't heard about that picture in years, or heard from Bruce. I never thought it would wind up in a window, much less the Hermès window. And if you think about it, how many pictures were in that book, and they had to pick mine?''  The second edition of ''Subway'' has 101 photographs, 42 more than in the first edition. Ms. Meyer, who is on page 71, says they are ''dark and menacing'' reminders of how much nicer the subways are now.  ''Can't say the same thing for service,'' she said.  Mr. Davidson said she is taller than he remembered. Ms. Meyer, who is 6 feet tall, remembered him as being shorter than his 5 feet 8 inches. But one thing has not changed: she still rides the M train.  ''I'm still in the same house, still in the same neighborhood, which is not a bad thing, though people tend to look at you kind of goofy,'' she said.  ''When you say you're 51 and live with your mom,'' she said. ''People tend to measure your life in terms of are you married. I have my health, I have my faith, I learned to ski, starting at age 38, I've skied all over the place. I went through this business in the World Trade Center, so I don't think my life's been a loss because I don't have a husband and a dog and a cat.''
Barbara Meyer and photographer Bruce Davidson recall day in 1986 when he took his memorable picture of her on elevated subway station in Brooklyn; picture appears in Davidson's 1986 book Subway and in new edition; photo (M)