The Woman Everyone Missed in That Playboy Issue

Everyone’s busy talking about Kate Moss, and fine, I get it. But there’s another name in that same Playboy issue that deserves more than a passing glance, and it’s Alejandra Guilmant—and if you scrolled past her pages to get to the famous ones, I genuinely feel sorry for you.

David Bellemere shot her, which explains everything. He has a specific talent for making nudity feel like a private thing you’ve accidentally stumbled into rather than a performance staged for a lens, and whatever he did here, it worked. Guilmant is a Mexican model, and whatever the editorial brief was, the result is something quieter and more unsettling than the cover story built around it. The kind of photos you come back to.

I didn’t know her name before this issue. I do now. The internet filled in the rest quickly enough—she’d been working in Paris, picking up editorial work across Europe, hadn’t quite broken through in the way someone with that face probably should have. Sometimes that’s how it goes. One spread in the right magazine, one photographer who knows what he’s looking at. I’ve bookmarked an unreasonable number of images from this shoot today, which is as close to a critical verdict as I’m going to offer.