Topless in Every Time Zone

Sometimes I look at certain Instagram accounts and feel a very specific kind of despair—not sadness exactly, more like the sharp awareness that someone else got a completely different deal. Nigora lives in Los Angeles, nominally, though her feed reads more like a log of every warm-weather country on earth: Thailand, Mexico, Jamaica, and whatever comes next. Somewhere between each destination she finds time to take her shirt off for a photograph, which is a sentence I mean entirely without irony and with considerable appreciation.

American photographer Darren Ankenman pulled her back to LA long enough to shoot her for the French Purple Magazine, and the results land exactly where you’d expect—beautiful, unhurried, slightly sun-dazed. She looks like someone who has never once been cold.

There’s a particular version of modern freedom this kind of life represents, and I’m aware that the reality probably involves more hustle and algorithm management than the pictures suggest. Still. You scroll through and watch the hearts accumulate and the proposals roll in, and some part of your brain just goes quiet and envious for a moment. I wonder which country she’s in right now.