Being Miss Universe

Seven months after being named the most universally beautiful woman in the world, Pia Wurtzbach has grown into the job.

- Sasha Martinez

THERE IS NOT MUCH TO LOOK AT IN A NEARLY EMPTY, cavernous hotel ballroom: The skeletons of tables and chairs and pedestals and parties-past tucked against one wall, the pattern of the carpet careful not to offend, the heavy chandeliers alit and looming overhead.

The virtual emptiness surrounding us is as good an excuse as any for the stunned yet cautious gawking once the heavy doors open: Pia Alonzo Wurtzbach, one day shy of being seven months into her reign as Miss Universe, is striding into the room wearing a loose shirt and an inconsequential pair of panties. Her hair is tousled, lionine in its fullness; her face is achingly bare. If I will myself blind to the bevy of people surrounding her, equal parts magazine staff and the entourage de rigueur for a beauty queen, it’s all too easy to place Wurtzbach as a young woman at the end of a long day, looking pleasantly exhausted, relieved to be stripped of both makeup and clothes meant for show.

But it is a calculated dishevelment, though no less appealing for it. Being Miss Universe takes work—is work. Even mussing up the glitz hanging about a title-holder insists on a certain kind of committed diligence from everyone involved. The careful way Wurtzbach was divested of her false eyelashes, the ruffling of her naturally smooth hair, the lotion rubbed against her shins—it’s part of the job. (And for us, her largely hushed audience, there is a keen satisfaction and awe in the witnessing of her studied undoing: Here is proof that the Miss Universe’s beauty is writ on her bones—a beauty magnified by the level of composure and self-possession required to cross a hotel hallway without pants on at least three times during the course of the evening.)