How to Be Looked At

Miranda Kerr, photographed by Terry Richardson for Purple Fashion. She’s twenty-nine here, Sydney-born, Victoria’s Secret Angel, at the time still married to Orlando Bloom—a biography that reads like it was assembled by an algorithm trained on lifestyle magazines. And yet there’s something specific about her that doesn’t disappear into the archetype. Something in the eyes that suggests she’s somewhere else entirely even while giving you everything you asked for.

I don’t have complicated feelings about Miranda Kerr. I just think she’s extraordinarily good at being looked at, which is the job, and most people are bad at it. Richardson’s pictures catch something real in her—not the runway version, not the red-carpet version, but something more provisional, more present. The Australian accent she speaks in, that flat, slightly nasal drawl that no amount of international work seems to file down, feels like the only genuinely unmanaged thing about her public image. Which is probably why I like it.