Last October, Sarah McDaniel, a consummate Snapchat and Instagram user, skyrocketed to internet stardom when her striking appearance—we're talking about her different eye colors, the result of a hereditary condition called heterochromia iridum—garnered a lot of important "likes." Meteoric rises are often years in the making; for Sarah, becoming a sensation took milliseconds. News outlets around the world, from The Mirror in England to Univision in Mexico, took notice. Her online following swelled by thousands. The talent scouts at Guess wanted in. Then Grammy-winning uberproducer and DJ Mark Ronson offered her a role in the music video for "Daffodils" (the second single off his album Uptown Special), shot by Theo Wenner. Wenner, the high-profile scion of the founder of the media company behind Rolling Stone, had just finished photographing Adele. When he met Sarah, he gave her a single direction for the video's three-day shoot in the Bahamas: to be her supercasual self, as if she were on vacation. She nailed it. Perhaps it's Sarah's deeply transfixing, star-making irises, but we want to wake up next to her every morning. Or maybe it's something more? Maybe it's her unapologetic attitude. Sarah is neither shy nor humble; her Instagram handle is @krotchy, and her feed is a campy mix of perfectly squared selfies and biting, salacious wit. "My sense of humor is being an asshole," she says. In conversation she appears more genuine than any of the actresses peddling publicist-penned talking points on late-night TV. Sarah describes herself as "loud, weird and annoying," admits she didn't know about Wenner's storied past before they met and has zero qualms about posting a picture of herself going to town on a Chipotle burrito. "My agency gets upset about it. They don't like my user name. They think I post raunchy stuff. They want me to post only salads and not have a personality. But my job as a model is to portray, to act. When I go online, it's to let people know who I am," Sarah says. "Imagine if you met a girl who was quiet and meek and didn't want to talk to you. How fun is that?" No fun at all, which is why we wanted Sarah and Wenner to team up again, this time in a Manhattan hotel, to capture the beautiful rawness of a 21st-century digitally connected, unfiltered woman who is making it all happen without letting anything go. "The idea was to look at me from a boyfriend's perspective," Sarah says. "This is very intimate. I'm not even wearing makeup." When most of us are obsessively filtering, fluffing and faking it, Sarah's realness—or should we call it It girl-ness?—is enough to get us high. Put simply, it's addictive.
