The Body That Won’t Apologize

Kate Upton knows exactly what she has. At 21, she told V Magazine as much—that she understands what her body earns her and what it means in an industry that spent years trying to make curves into something requiring justification. She didn’t sound defensive. She sounded clear-eyed, which is rarer than it should be.

The shoot was by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, whose work usually runs cold and architectural—controlled, ironic, maintaining a certain remove. With Upton there’s none of that. The photos are warm and direct and very difficult to look away from, which is not entirely unrelated to the fact that she is extremely and specifically built. The friction between photographers known for cerebral distance and a subject who operates on pure physical presence works better than it has any right to.

The magazine ran a cover gimmick—adjust a slider to reveal more or less of her—framed as commentary on how media controls the female body. Maybe. I clicked the slider in both directions without a great deal of philosophical weight behind it.

In the interview with Horacio Silva she said she wants to be a positive example for other women. I believe her. Knowing what you have and refusing to perform shame about it is genuinely useful to put in the world, and she was doing it more clearly and earlier than most. The whole thing makes a reasonable case that you can be exactly what people want to look at and still have something like a perspective on it. She was twenty-one and had already figured that out. Good for her.