At first appearance, Vail Bloom '04 seems like an ordinary Princeton student. Well, maybe that's an exaggeration — after all, it was her looks that won her a photo spread in the men's magazine Maxim. The world over, Web surfers, magazine aficionados and literature fans can access her picture, and she's poised to become more ubiquitous still.
Bloom says she had done some commercial modeling work before Maxim, but not at that high level of exposure. In fact, the job offer itself came as a surprise.
"Somehow some pictures got stolen from my modeling portfolio and put on the web," said Bloom. "I was really angry at first. I was going into my eating club and seeing my picture on a screensaver, and I was getting really uncomfortable."
"My best friend thought it was hilarious," she added.
As a joke, this friend sent Bloom's photos into a Maxim photo contest called "Hometown Hotties," Bloom said. Bloom won the first round, placing in the top 100 from an initial draw of nearly 10,000 candidates. She has continued to win every round since, and is currently in the final round.
As a finalist, she was featured in a Maxim photo spread. If she wins the contest, she will receive a modeling contract, a cash award and other prizes.
Bloom, who plans to pursue modeling and acting, said the greatest benefit of winning is professional exposure. In the future, though, she said she does not want to work for other racy publications.
Bloom's photo spread appears in a recent Maxim issue. Beneath it is a suggestive interview which Bloom says is largely fabricated.
"Maxim asked, 'Where's the best place for guys to score in your town?' and I said 'Well, the easiest place is probably Tiger Inn.' " Bloom said.
"When they printed the interview, they changed the question to 'What's the best place to meet guys?' " she said.
In an effort to increase circulation, The Daily Princetonian is publishing its own photo spread of another famous campus beauty.
For our spread, we followed Maxim's lead, as Bloom explained it, and constructed an interview by adapting lines from F. Scott Fitzgerald '17's writings and writing new questions to precede them.
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