She Still Has to Buy Toilet Paper

Charlotte Free was famous for her pink hair years before pink hair became a Pinterest decision. There was something genuinely striking about her—a blank, faintly feral quality certain models have where they seem to exist outside normal social coordinates, as if high fashion were simply their natural habitat. Then someone photographed her in a drugstore buying toilet paper, and the internet briefly made a whole thing of it, in that specific 2011 way where celebrity mundanity was its own genre. The image did what those images always do: collapsed the distance between the person on the magazine page and the person in the checkout line, as if the toilet paper were the revelation. As if we’d somehow forgotten.