Fifth Place

Germany’s Next Topmodel has always been more sociology experiment than talent competition—weeks of watching young women cry, fight, and receive unsolicited haircuts while Heidi Klum delivers elimination verdicts in a sequined dress. The winner gets a cover and a campaign and then mostly dissolves into the general atmosphere of German fashion media. The losers are forgotten slightly faster.

Taynara Wolf finished fifth in the 2016 season, which in the GNTM economy is approximately the same as not placing at all. She survived every bizarre shoot, every runway challenge, every interpersonal meltdown the show could manufacture, and still went home just before the finale. Kim Hnizdo won that year. Kim Hnizdo is modeling for something, somewhere, presumably.

Then Taynara shot for Playboy—the August 2018 issue, photographed by Philip la Pepa—and the math shifted considerably. This felt like a deliberate reintroduction on her own terms, without the show’s machinery shaping the image. The interview is almost endearingly specific: she doesn’t want a bad boy. I want the prince on a white horse—caring, loving, a real protector. And he has to have a sense of humor and not take himself too seriously. Also: I’m afraid of the dark—of ghosts, specifically. Which is either the most relatable thing a Playboy model has said in print or the most carefully calibrated, and I genuinely cannot tell which.

Kim Hnizdo has not shot for Playboy. Fifth place keeps looking better.