The 2019 Pirelli Calendar Stars a Very Paris Hilton-Like Gigi Hadid

The Scottish photographer Albert Watson is well aware that he could have made it much, much easier for himself to photograph the 2019 Pirelli Calendar. “Anybody who knows my work knows that I don’t have any problem with photographing women naked,” he said earlier this week at the Milan headquarters of Pirelli, the tire company which, for more than half a century, ensured that each and every new year brought a fresh new set of star-studded, expertly photographed nudes along with it. Things have, of course, changed since pin-ups’ heyday, and Pirelli has taken note; it’s now four years deep into rethinking what it means to be a bombshell, meaning they were already perfectly poised to carry out Watson’s goal of breaking with tradition. (“It just seemed like the wrong time to take a bunch of models down to the beach and have them take their tops off,” he continued.) With aspiration, not perspiration, as his focus, Watson laboriously crafted four different narratives about women’s dreams and ambitions, for which he cast Misty Copeland, Julia Garner, Laetitia Casta, and Gigi Hadid. Accomplished as they already are, they still learned a thing or two from the up-and-comers: playing a Paris Hilton-like heiress in search of greater meaning helped Hadid, for example, come to terms with her real-life loneliness and “guilt of privilege”, whereas Copeland, on the quite opposite end of the spectrum, played her role of an aspiring dancer so convincingly that the owner of a local strip club attempted to hire her on the spot. Join each of them in their dreams with a preview of next year’s calendar, here.