Marcel Winatschek

Kate Upton Was the Whole Year

Kate Upton in late 2012 was genuinely inescapable. The Cat Daddy video had broken the internet a few months earlier—that slow-motion sequence, filmed at a Sports Illustrated shoot, that made her cover feel almost redundant afterward. Skullcandy knew exactly what they were doing putting her in a campaign at this particular moment, right at peak cultural saturation. It was nakedly commercial and it worked. The headphones were beside the point.