The Radical Softened

Miranda Kerr in V Magazine styled as Cicciolina. Sebastian Faena shot it—black and white, then color, the photographs alternating in mood the way Faena does.

Cicciolina, Elena Staller, made pornographic films through the eighties and nineties: Wet Teens and Hot Jeans, Yellow Emanuelle, the usual catalog. But the porn was never actually the story. She ran for parliament on an actual platform—anti-nuclear, pro-legalization of everything (drugs, sex work, whatever), against animal testing, against the death penalty. She won. She sat in Rome from 1987 to 1992 representing the Radical Party, refusing to compartmentalize herself, refusing to apologize for any of it.

Then you’ve got Kerr. Victoria’s Secret. The kind of beauty designed to be aspirational but not dangerous, purchasable but not challenging.

The shoot itself is good—Kerr positioned in Cicciolina’s world for a moment, older and rawer than she’s usually allowed to be. The photographs work. For a beat, the contradiction exists in the frame.

But it’s still a photoshoot in a magazine. It’s still fashion. The radical becomes a reference, an aesthetic, something beautiful and unthreatening. Cicciolina gets turned into a look. And Kerr gets to wear her for a moment before moving on to the next campaign, the next version of herself.

That’s the distance between radical and image: how easily one becomes the other.