Marcel Winatschek

Miranda Kerr Knows Her Alphabet

VICE absorbed i-D Magazine around 2013, folding a forty-year-old institution into its alternative media operation, and to mark the occasion they made A-Z of Wink: one model per letter of the alphabet, each doing the signature i-D wink, one after another until the alphabet runs out. That’s the whole thing. It should feel like an ad. It mostly feels like evidence.

Cara Delevingne is in it. Joan Smalls, Lara Stone. Miranda Kerr, who shows up in an outfit so precisely right that I rewound the thing twice just to confirm what I was looking at. All of them shot beautifully, all of them doing this absurdly charming thing with one eye. The format sounds ridiculous described like this, and it absolutely isn’t.

VICE got a lot right aesthetically in those years. The i-D acquisition made a kind of ruthless sense: take a magazine that had spent four decades finding the most interesting-looking people on earth and point a better-funded camera at them. The results landed exactly as you’d hope.