She Always Knew
She knew it would happen. Filippa Smeds had been blogging for about a year when we talked, already pulling fifty to seventy comments a post, getting features in Elle Girl, Les Mads, Metro dubbing her Stockholm’s best-dressed girl. When I asked if she’d expected any of this, she didn’t hesitate. She’d always believed her blog would get huge. There was no other choice, really—either you have it or you don’t.
That kind of certainty at nineteen, unearned by accomplishment but riding on genuine taste and presence, should probably annoy me. Somehow it doesn’t. There’s a realness to it. She’s a Lookbook.nu kid, the kind of person for whom the entire internet is a natural stage, and she carries herself like she knows the spotlight won’t leave. Every day, a little bit more famous. It’s not the work that impresses me—it’s the permission she’s given herself.
Her sources are immediate. She pulls from everywhere: rockstar girlfriends and groupies, her mom (who was basically a music-industry muse back in the day, hung out with actual Swedish musicians), the aesthetics of everyone around her who has any kind of taste. Stockholm helps—there’s something about that city that produces these people naturally, girls who seem to understand instinctively that fashion is attention in another form. Right now there’s a whole wave of that energy coming out of Sweden, and she’s riding it without being particularly grateful about it.
I asked her about the red hair. It’s obvious why—it stops you. When she was younger she hated it, wanted to disappear into the crowd like her blonde siblings. Now she understands it as an asset, the kind of thing you don’t have to earn because you’re born with it. She says it made her shy, made her hyper-aware of how she looked. That’s probably not irrelevant to the fact that she cares so much now about dressing well. You stare at yourself long enough because of something you can’t control, eventually you learn to make the staring mean something.
Her boyfriend Adam is a musician type, not a fashion person. She went to school with him, thought his hair and tight jeans were hot, so she just walked up and took him. He’s proud of her blogging but honestly doesn’t love all the attention. He’d rather have her to himself. That detail stuck with me—there’s real friction there, between what she’s built and what someone close to her actually wants.
Her parents are splitting. She might end up in her dad’s new apartment in what she says is the nicest part of Stockholm. She lived in Germany for a month, loved it, has been to Berlin three times. She loves all kinds of films—Miyazaki, Da Vinci Code, adventure stuff. Watches Miami Ink and Sex and the City. Muse is her favorite band right now but it shifts. Reads everything: Elle, Vogue, Dazed & Confused, Inked, Self Service. Actually loves magazines.
What gets to me is that she’s already got the long view. Doesn’t need the validation, though she likes it. Keeps reaching for whatever’s next. She wants to be a rockstar or treasure hunter, maybe this year, but suspects it’ll somehow come back to fashion. Doesn’t know what’s ahead but she’s certain it’ll be something. That kind of faith in yourself, at nineteen, without irony—I don’t see it much. Rare enough that I bothered to write it down.