The One Question Nobody Should Ask Her Again

GQ has always occupied a strange middle space—too much fashion for men who just want to read about cars, not enough skin for everyone else. A magazine that decided "gentleman" was a brand and committed to that bit for sixty years. I stopped paying attention to it some time ago.

Then they put Emily Ratajkowski on the cover, shot by Terry Richardson, and I paid attention again. The images have that quality Richardson does at his best—casual staging, direct eye contact, everything slightly overexposed in a way that feels deliberate. She’s been everywhere since Blurred Lines that summer, and apparently every interviewer still leads with the video, which is the laziest possible entry into a conversation with someone this worth talking to. The photos do more than the Q&A does. They usually do.

I’m not going to pretend this is about the journalism.