Everything She Already Knew
Filippa Smeds expected all of it. That’s the first and most interesting thing about her. When I asked whether she’d anticipated the response her blog would get—fifty to seventy comments per post after just one year of writing, features in Elle Girl, being named best-dressed girl in Stockholm by Metro—she answered without hesitation: yes. It sounds a bit conceited,
she admitted, but I always believed in myself and that my blog would become very big. There was simply no other option for me. Either you have it or you don’t.
That kind of certainty, in a nineteen-year-old, is either exhausting or magnetic. In Filippa’s case it seems to be both.
She runs Gillo Filippa, a personal style blog out of Stockholm built around outfits, attitude, and a very consistent voice. The format isn’t complicated, but her presence in it is. You never wonder who’s writing—she’s there on every page, specific and assured in a way that most fashion blogs, with their interchangeable aspirational aesthetic, simply are not.
Her inspirations, she told me, are rock legends and the women around them—the girlfriends, the groupies, the ones who shaped the aesthetic from slightly offstage. This tracks. Her mother, whom she named as her main role model, spent her youth working at a Swedish record label and running with that world. A band wrote a song about her. She appeared on album covers and cassette sleeves. There’s a whole mythology there that clearly shaped how Filippa thinks about style—not as fashion in the industry sense, but as identity, as the story other people will tell about you.
Her boyfriend Adam is the opposite of all that. He’s not into fashion—he’s into music, which is its own kind of statement. She made the first move at school because she liked his hair and his tight jeans. So I just went and got him, haha.
He’s proud of what she does but not exactly thrilled about the attention it generates. He’d prefer to have her to himself. That tension—visibility versus intimacy—runs quietly through everything she said.
The red hair is unavoidable, literally and conversationally. Her brother and sister are both blonde—the typical Swedish look,
she said—and Filippa spent a significant portion of her childhood wishing she matched them. Standing out made her shy. It pushed her toward a consciousness about appearance that her siblings probably never had to develop. Now she’s converted that childhood discomfort into the thing that defines her. It’s already something special to be different without having to do anything for it.
The self-awareness in that sentence is considerable.
She’d spent a month in Düsseldorf living with a German family, and had visited Berlin three times and Hamburg too. She’s fond of Germany in a way that feels genuine rather than polite, frustrated that some people still carry outdated impressions of the country. Stockholm and Berlin have a certain shared frequency—a similar mix of cool-climate severity and subcultural energy—even if Swedes rarely admit the resemblance.
Outside fashion, her taste refuses to be neat: My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away alongside The Da Vinci Code and National Treasure. Muse as her current favorite band. She reads Dazed & Confused, Vogue, Inked, Self Service, and described loving magazines with a delight that felt genuine rather than brand-building. She watches Miami Ink and Project Runway. It’s a mix that refuses to be categorized, which is probably deliberate.
She wants to be a rock star or a treasure hunter. This year she’s trying the rock star thing. Maybe it ends up being fashion in some form. She doesn’t know what’s coming but she’s sure it’s something great. I believe her. People who expect things to work out sometimes just turn out to be right.