Miss White

Two things about Instagram drive me insane. First: the way it eats thirty minutes without asking, a slow scroll through photos and stories until you look up and the afternoon is gone. Second: the creeping suspicion, while scrolling, that everyone else is living somewhere warmer and better-lit than you, with more interesting things to do and better-looking people to share them with.

I know the trick. I know most people run their supposedly spontaneous shots through a battery of apps before posting anything. I know all of this and it still gets me every time.

Kirby White is a model from New South Wales, Australia, and her feed has a quality that’s hard to fake: it looks effortless because the life itself seems actually good. She’s at the beach with friends, on a couch, in the shower—and even those unremarkable moments look better in her version than they do in mine. When I’m in the shower, I’m mainly focused on not slipping on the shampoo bottle I knocked over while simultaneously debating whether peeing in there is morally acceptable. Kirby is just standing in the water looking like an argument for being alive.

Australian photographer David Collier shot her for an editorial in Nakid Magazine—the series is called Miss White, and it is very much NSFW. Kirby doing domestic things: cleaning, showering, lounging around a pretty apartment on that enormous island continent, bare-breasted throughout. And at one point there is pizza. The pizza matters—it takes something that could tip into pure aspiration and keeps it earthbound. Though honestly, a beautiful woman eating pizza topless is aspirational in its own right.

If I ever find a genie, I’m wasting at least one wish on getting my life to look half as good as her Tuesday afternoon.