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There are few people that have occupied the lens quite as much as Hunter Schafer–the Miu Miu model-turned-Hollywood actor–who has become an intense presence on Getty Images and Instagram feeds over the past 12 months. Like most famous people with a salaried stylist–in this case the brilliant Dara Allen–Schafer could be considered a self-authored artwork in and of herself: her entire look is art-directed and public appearances thus a medium of contemporary image-making.
But Hunter Schafer is also an artwork in the most literal sense of the word. That is because she last night attended GQ magazine’s Global Creativity Awards in New York and had her portrait illustrated by an on-site caricaturist. The resemblance was almost (almost) uncanny. And it is also because the actor wore a Marni dress which designer Francesco Risso’s atelier had smeared in thick, impressionist swirls of acrylic paint–evoking one of Vincent van Gogh’s lesser-known pieces: The Starry Night.
At the second edition of the magazine’s awards, Schafer was being honored alongside Lewis Hamilton, comedian Danny McBride, Nine Inch Nails bandmates Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and actor JB Smoove for being a “paradigm of what drives cultural influence in 2024.” All of those guests wore suits–which is a likely thing for men to wear at a GQ event with a black-tie dress code–but it is, perhaps, an artist’s prerogative to break with the rules and become the author of their own image.