Marcel Winatschek

Summer Has a Face

Sure, Kate Upton exists—the sun-bleached ideal, all American-girl radiance and Sports Illustrated mythology. Nobody’s entirely immune. But Emily Ratajkowski has been pulling focus for a while now, and the physics of that are hard to argue with. She walked into the global consciousness naked in Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines video, which is a hell of an introduction regardless of what you think of the song. The song was irritating. She was not.

Her latest shoot for GQ confirms what most people had already suspected: she is the summer. Not summery. Not a summer metaphor. The summer itself—that specific combination of too much light, not enough regret, and the feeling that the usual rules are temporarily suspended. I can’t think of a stronger argument for the continued existence of glossy print.