The Emily Ratajkowski Problem

You know that specific moment when a person enters your peripheral awareness and suddenly they’re everywhere—every website, every magazine cover, every corner of the internet—and you realize you’ve been missing them for months? That’s what happened to me with Emily Ratajkowski. I looked up one afternoon and she was simply there, fully formed, apparently having been famous for a while already without my knowledge.

The comparison I keep making is to the first time I saw Kate Upton—that all-American, abundant, slightly unreal quality, the sense that someone had designed this person specifically to short-circuit coherent thought. Ratajkowski operates differently. There’s something more angular about her, more deliberate, though I’m aware that analysis is doing very little useful work here. People will tell you about her lips, the vague unfocused quality of her eyes in photographs. Those people are wrong.

These outtakes from a shoot for Darius Magazine by Jonathan Leder are better than most things that actually get published. Whoever is responsible for putting her in front of cameras—keep doing that. I’m sitting here eating biscuits and waiting for the next batch of photos like it’s my actual job. It is not my actual job. I don’t care.