Stay True
There’s this 16-year-old photographer from a small Dutch village where, by her account, the words ’style’ and ’fashion’ don’t really exist. Everyone’s in black jackets, black pants, black shoes, and they seem perfectly fine with it. The rain helps—if it’s always wet and gray, why bother with clothes? She hates it. She drives to Amsterdam and Utrecht when she can, looking for people who actually care how they look, but even there you have to search. That kind of restlessness at sixteen, that impatience with your surroundings, usually means you’re going somewhere else.
Her name is Rosey Jones. She models a little, writes, calls herself a geek, reads psychology books, but photography is the thing. She’s been doing it seriously for three years. She says it’s the way she knows how to say things about herself that she can’t say otherwise. She had nine piercings in her face at one point—in her nose, her eyebrow, her lip—but she took them out for a modeling job in January and only two remain. The hidden ones: a smiley she won’t show you, and a small silver line beneath her lip. She didn’t fight about it. She understood that modeling work came first, and she was okay with that compromise. But the piercings were about declaring something, and now that declaration happens differently.
She’s got two tattoos. The first is ’Stay True’ on her wrist, done in October 2008, right when she needed it most—after years of doing what other people wanted, finally letting that version of herself go. The second is ’Stolz,’ the German word for pride, tattooed inside her lip where most people won’t see it. Her ex-boyfriend once told her she had too much pride, like it was a flaw. She decided it wasn’t. She flipped the reading on it and wore it as fact.
Her romantic life is a mess in that specific way that matters at sixteen. She’s single but her ex is still circling her thoughts, except he’s now dating her best friend, and she can’t quite get him out of her head. She’s tried seeing other people—boys, even a girl—but nothing sticks while he’s still there. She has a few genuine best friends, all women, but mostly she hangs out with guys. She likes the simplicity of it: sitting around, smoking, talking about girls, no manufactured drama, no one making mountains out of nothing.
Her taste in music is sharp. She’s obsessed with City and Colour—Dallas Green’s acoustic stuff—wakes up to it, falls asleep to it. But she also goes to metal and hardcore shows constantly, and she loves the energy of them, loves that the lyrics say something real even in all that noise. The contradiction doesn’t trouble her: tender and loud, both at once. She doesn’t read magazines, doesn’t have time for films, reads heavy books about psychology instead. Mode and fashion aren’t things you study—they’re things you have or you don’t. You either understand how to wear clothes, or you follow trends and hope for the best. She isn’t going to follow trends.
What matters to her is that in a few years people will recognize her photographs. She wants to shoot bands that matter, not just local shows but bigger names. She wants to do fashion work for real labels. She’s stated this like fact, not dream. She’ll get there. She knows it. The small village, the rain, the people in their black jackets—that’s background noise. She’s already looking past it.