Dutch Type
The Dutch just hit different. Everyone knows this. I was twenty, stoned behind a student bar in Amsterdam, when three tall blonde women appeared out of nowhere like they’d been waiting onstage. Emma, Sophie, Madelief. Their long hair moved in the wind while they smoked the joint like it was nothing, and I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. I was too much in my head, too aware of how far out of my depth I was. I never talked to them, but I stayed half in love with them anyway—with something about the ease, the straightforwardness, the way they existed without narrating themselves.
Years later I saw Tiffany van Roest in the new Playboy and something caught. Twenty-three, from Soest, and she could’ve been a cousin of those three women. The shoot was nude, which is the whole function of Playboy, and reading her talk about it afterward she was just as direct. She’s comfortable naked because she actually lives that way, goes to saunas without thinking about it much. The photographer was good company. They had fun, the photos came out fine, and she talked about the whole thing the same way she talks about anything else—no shame, no performance. That’s the Dutch thing.
But the real subject isn’t the photographs. It’s that when you read what she actually does, who she actually is, she’s more interesting than any shot could capture. She works in a care facility for aging horses, has two of her own, and would rather live on land with them than anywhere else. She barely wears makeup because she doesn’t think about it. She’s looking for a dark-haired guy with brown eyes and a few days of stubble, but more importantly she wants someone who makes her laugh, because humor is a currency to her. She was single and wasn’t performing being desperate about it—just clear.
That’s the type I remember. The kind of person who knows what she wants and says it without flinching, who’d be exactly the same in a barn as in a photograph, who cares more about horses than about being looked at. The Playboy thing is incidental to that. It’s just what happened. The real substance is the steadiness underneath, the person who doesn’t perform, who just exists as herself. That’s what got me in Amsterdam. That’s what reads here.