Her Girlfriend’s Name Is Somewhere on Her Leg
Four months before our conversation, Sonya Twinklepop had a name tattooed on her leg. Her girlfriend’s—Asya—permanent, matter-of-fact, no apparent regret. She mentioned it the way you mention something you’d do again tomorrow.
Sonya is seventeen, lives in Moscow, and photographs people at parties with a professional Canon she bought specifically for this. She left modeling school not long before we talked, drifted through a stretch of parties and photo sessions, got bored of both, started writing for a Russian magazine. They published her work. Then photography pulled harder than words and the writing went on pause. The model-to-photographer pipeline is familiar enough, but doing it at seventeen with this much intention is something else.
I asked her about Moscow, which from the outside looks perpetually unhinged. She shrugged: she was born there, she can’t see the strangeness from inside it. That might also be because I’ve already gone a bit crazy myself.
She likes it there. Russian fashion, she said, is running brighter lately—more color, clothes often cut from a single piece of fabric. A specific observation, not a generalization.
Her references read like a certain mood board done right: Cory Kennedy, the Olsen twins, Twiggy, Edie Sedgwick. She doesn’t lift looks wholesale—she takes details and routes them somewhere new. It sounds simple and it isn’t.
The last film she’d watched was the Joy Division documentary, which she loved. She barely turns on a TV. Music runs from Santigold back to Elvis, with a current obsession with electroclash—Peaches, Ugress, the kind of stuff that sounds like a Berlin basement at 3 a.m. with bad intentions. For print: Vogue and Nylon.
She wants to get back to modeling seriously and plans to enroll at the Faculty of Journalism this year. The ambitions are real—they just spread across too many things at once, which is what seventeen looks like when you’re actually paying attention to yourself.
The tattoo is what stays with me. At seventeen, permanently writing someone’s name on your body might be the most honest thing you can do. Asya is her girlfriend and her name is on Sonya’s leg, and that is the most specific, direct thing I learned from a fashion interview about anyone.