He walks through strobe and electric air, wearing silk suits and 1950s tennis outfits, chain-mail vests and, once, unbelievably, a cashmere diaper. His is not to question why. His is not to ponder too deeply the cashmere diaper, let alone the ugly, frozen planets at the edge of existence or the huddled, tattered-shoed masses. He sometimes walks wearing $1,000 loafers of the finest calfskin and then, the next moment, walks barefoot.

He's neither waif nor muscled lunker. He never works out, does very little except occasionally relinquish himself to the hands of a masseuse or manicurist to keep up appearances. But he walks a lot, through purple-lit alleys walled with people who want him - or, more precisely, who want what he wears. He walks the runways in Paris, Berlin, New York, Milan - wherever the money's best. In front of hundreds, sometimes thousands of admirers, he has walked to a soundtrack of women groaning in erotic ecstasy, and he has walked to street-thug boasts about the thrill of capping cops. He's the bullet and the G-spot.

No matter what the venue, the walk is virtually the same. It's nothing he learned deliberately and it's nothing he's had to practice. He bends slightly forward, head leading, mouth fastened, serious-looking to the point of menace, but a kind of empty menace, an unmenacing menace defined at its center by a blankness onto which others project their own ideas about sex, power, money and culture. He is merely a movie screen. A bauble. Pez. When he appears before the crowd, his blue eyes gaze straight ahead, receiving and reflecting nothing. His face is its own landscape, one of planed surfaces that change with the light, the mood, the dress. He has small ears, full lips, a strong, straight nose. He has high cheekbones and a forehead that has a kind of Cro-Magnon power. And yet he seems delicate somehow. He's better looking than Keanu Reeves, the person people have said he vaguely resembles. He thinks he looks like his dad.

Mostly, people don't care what he thinks - or even what his name is. Despite being one of the world's top models, despite having had contracts with Hugo Boss and Calvin Klein, he's only a face, a shell. Even as he looms on posters in store windows or appears in magazine spreads, even as he walks the runways of the world, few people pause to wonder whether he believes in God or wants kids someday or even if he had a heroin problem years ago. He decorates our culture, is being used up by it, and he knows this. He was born beautiful, be he wasn't born dumb. If people condescend, that's their problem. He's 21 years old and owns a car and a house in Japan, rents a swank apartment on Gramercy Park in New York with his model girlfriend and travels the world, partying with other beautiful people and drinking Cristal. Nice work, if you can get it. By the way, his name is Robert Boyd Holbrook. You've already met him thirty, forty, fifty times without knowing it. He was the wordless one, lurking there in your closet. He was the one who wore your coat, your suit, your checked shirt, your striped socks, even your cashmere diaper.

And that's why you bought it.