Twelve Strangers Before Noon

I fall in love roughly a dozen times a day. At bus stops, in café queues, at the top of escalator stairs—someone walks past trailing the right scent, wearing the right shoes, and I’m already two years deep into a fantasy: cheap red wine from the corner store, a rooftop somewhere, one of us tickling the other until someone cries, and eventually telling the whole story to our kids.

Zoe Aggeliki Mantzakanis is exactly that kind of problem. Swedish, Greek, and French by blood—a combination that should require a prescription. I would sell every single one of you, without hesitation or remorse, for one afternoon with her. We’d go to IKEA. We’d eat gyros. We’d do whatever French people do in their spare time besides speak the most beautiful language on earth while complaining loudly and chain-smoking.

Australian photographer Brydie Mack has already lived something close to this dream—she shot Zoe for the new lookbook of Jen’s Pirate Booty. Sparse landscape, full sun, somewhere that looks like the beautiful edge of the world. Those eyebrows. I’m not doing okay.