Stay True, Rain or Otherwise
Rosey Jones is sixteen, lives in a small village in the Netherlands where "style" might as well be a foreign word, and has two tattoos, a residual handful of piercings, and opinions sharp enough to cut glass. She came to my attention through Lookbook, where she describes herself as a model, photographer, writer, and geek. She means all four.
Photography is the one she loves. Three years in, and when asked what gives her the most satisfaction out of everything she does, she didn’t have to think about it: Photography is definitely my passion—it owns my heart.
The modeling arrived later and turned serious faster than expected, but the camera is where she goes to actually think. She shoots bands, models, people around her, and her work has the directness of someone who learned by doing rather than by studying.
Her relationship with the Netherlands is considerably colder. It rains constantly, and everyone in her village responds by dressing identically—black jacket, black trousers, black shoes. She travels to Amsterdam and Utrecht when she can, where people with actual style are findable if you know where to look, but even that requires effort. Her aesthetic sensibility formed almost entirely in opposition to her surroundings, which probably explains why it’s as developed as it is at sixteen.
Her personal life is the kind of tangle that’s only really possible at that age. Her ex is still in her head months after the split, currently going out with her best friend, and she hasn’t been able to clear him out despite seeing other people since. I just can’t get into a relationship with someone else while he’s still haunting me,
she says, without apparent self-pity. Her three closest female friends are all entangled in the same overlapping history—one is an ex herself, another is the one now with the ex. The rest of her circle is almost entirely male, which she prefers: no drama, just company, sitting in the sun, smoking, talking. She’s probably right that it’s simpler.
She had nine piercings in her face until January, when a modeling job required she remove them. Now she’s down to two—one under her lip, one inside her mouth, a smiley that stays invisible unless she decides to show you. The tattoos stayed. Stay True
on her wrist, October 2008—the timing deliberate, marking the moment she finally let go of a version of herself that had spent years doing what everyone else wanted. The second one is inside her lip: "Stolz," German for pride. Her ex told her she had too much of it. She had it tattooed where only she’d know it was there.
She listens to City and Colour—Dallas Green’s acoustic project—obsessively, first thing in the morning and last thing at night. She also goes to metal and hardcore shows and comes back half-deaf and somehow more alive than before. She reads psychology books and calls herself a nerd about it without apology. She doesn’t follow fashion websites, and when asked about trends she said something worth keeping: style is something you have; fashion is something you buy. You still need the former to make the latter mean anything.
What she wants is to photograph bands—bigger names than the local acts she’s been covering, eventually promo material for artists people actually know. She’ll get there. The certainty in how she talks about where she’s going doesn’t sound like hope. It sounds like a timeline.