Portrait Mode and Hard Nipples

Somewhere around 2017, the horizontal video started to feel dated. Not technically—the aspect ratio is still the correct one for cinema and television—but culturally, because the dominant screen most people were actually watching on was a phone held upright, and black bars on either side of a clip started reading as an artifact of habits nobody had anymore. Lena Meyer-Landrut, who won Eurovision for Germany in 2010 with Satellite and has been navigating the pop-to-cultural-figure transition ever since, shot the video for Don’t Lie To Me entirely in portrait format.

The video was directed by photographer Paul Ripke, and the concept is committed: it mimics a phone screen, cycling through app interfaces, notifications, the accumulated visual language of a device you’ve been staring into for a decade. Whether that makes it art or an extremely polished piece of marketing dressed as art is the question every work like this invites, and I’m not sure it’s answerable. What’s undeniable is that it works as a watch. The format suits her—Lena has been native to this mode for years, building an audience across platforms through the kind of calculated spontaneity that only looks easy when you’re very good at it.

A few weeks before the video dropped, she posted an Instagram story in front of her bathroom mirror wearing a thin top with nothing underneath, her nipples clearly hard through the fabric. The press covered it breathlessly. She let them. That’s not an accident—that’s someone who understands exactly how attention flows online and is completely comfortable directing it. The Don’t Lie To Me video is the same instinct applied to a longer format. She doesn’t just live on the internet; she knows how it thinks.