Lily Cole, Unguarded

I had a thing for redheads. Specific ones. Cintia Dicker. Lily Cole, the English model and actress who showed up in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and Snow White and the Huntsman—though that wasn’t really the point. With Lily it was worse because she had some quality that made you want to understand her, which meant staring at her constantly, which meant thinking about her in ways you don’t talk about.

POP Magazine ran an autumn-winter editorial with her, and I got a copy. She was mostly naked, which was the point, but what stuck was that she looked completely at ease—not performing sexiness, not doing the work of being desired, just existing in her own skin like she wasn’t afraid of any of it. Most models understand nudity as theater. She understood it as fact.

I spent more time with those pages than I’d want to admit, which probably says something about me and maybe nothing at all. There was an ease to the images, a quality of not being calculated for, that made them feel different from the usual editorial spread. Like catching someone at the one moment they weren’t thinking about being caught.

It’s been years and I’ve moved on to other redheads, other fixations. But I still think about that issue sometimes, that particular ease, that indifference to being desired. That’s the thing I haven’t quite gotten over.