Marcel Winatschek

Jennifer Medina Has More Projects Than Hours

Jennifer Medina was seventeen when she turned up on Lookbook.nu, posting outfits from somewhere in Florida with the kind of visual instinct that makes you wonder what it takes to end up that self-possessed at that age. She’d moved from Venezuela three years before, and the cultural contrast hadn’t flattened her—it seemed to have made her more attentive. There are so many people from different countries here, she said. Everyone has a different style and it’s really interesting to see them all. Though she was careful to note that fashion-consciousness was not exactly Florida’s dominant mode.

Her inspirations ran wide: art, music, film, photographs, books. Nothing she said felt like a rehearsed answer. She didn’t claim a particular aesthetic or drop the obvious reference names. Instead she talked about her brother, who made independent films, and how that had shaped her relationship to the medium—something personal rather than cinephile-from-a-distance. Musically she was deep in the indie electro corner, the kind of taste she acknowledged almost nobody around her shared, and said it without any particular bitterness.

What came through most clearly was a preference for making things over consuming them. More videos, more photographs, more music, more paintings—the list of what she wanted to do had the slightly desperate quality of someone who keeps running out of time, not ambition. The bookstore ritual with her best friend, coffee in hand, stacks of magazines spread across the table—that sounded like the organizing principle of her life at seventeen. W Magazine was the one she kept returning to, for the breadth of it.

No steady boyfriend, interesting friends, a strong sense of self. The photographs on her Lookbook page showed someone who dressed exactly the way she described: whatever she found, whatever seemed to go together, no particular agenda. That confidence—wearing something without needing it to mean anything—is genuinely hard to fake. Most people twice her age are still working on it.