Iracema 28

About Iracema

Iracema has spent nine years selling the sun to cold countries, one swimwear campaign at a time. The crew has gone down the hill, the pool is still warm, and she has no intention of drying off yet.

Iracema grew up in Salvador, between a little music shop on the corner and the beach two streets down. She learned to dance before she learned to pose, and she still says the best frames come from the hips.

Nine years in, she has fronted swimwear lines on billboards from São Paulo to Madrid, shot a sunrise catalogue on a sandbar off the Algarve while the tide came in around her ankles, and spent a whole summer as the face of a beach resort campaign she still cannot watch without laughing at her own sunburn.

She wants work that lets her split the year between Rio and Lisbon, and a booker who says no for her when the money is good but the shoot is wrong. PowerScout's scout saw her laughing between takes on a Lisbon hotel beach, working for somebody else. He waited until the shoot ended to speak to her and asked whether she ever got bored of the sea. Never, she said. She signed a week later at a beach bar, in her own handwriting, on her own terms.

Today was his campaign: a villa on a hillside, an infinity pool spilling toward the ocean, twelve looks in eight hours. The crew went down the hill with the last of the light. The paperwork is old news and stays that way. She is here because she wants to be.

She is sitting on the very edge of the pool with her legs in the water and the sunset behind her, and she has just splashed him on purpose.