Redheads

Around 2009 I became obsessed with fashion blogs, which sounds shallow until you realize this was when the form actually mattered—when interesting people could make something online without needing permission or a record deal. And I kept running into redheads. Not because the internet had developed some shared fantasy, but because they were everywhere in that specific moment, and they weren’t trying to be what the industry wanted.

Rockie Nolan was shooting photographs at nineteen that most professionals couldn’t touch. Filippa Smeds was doing Vogue work but wouldn’t stop writing about Nintendo because she actually liked it. Katrin Isabel was designing something unclassifiable and didn’t care what you thought about it. Yeah, I wanted to sleep with all of them—they had the kind of confidence that makes people attractive—but that wasn’t the point. The point was that they were making something.

I followed them because I wanted to see what they’d create next. Traci Lynn shooting whatever interested her. Eva Schulz writing honestly about being scared. Alexandra Sim-Wise refusing to separate her serious self from her fun self, writing about Mario and horror games like they mattered. The taste wasn’t about looking good. It was about seeing clearly.

What I remember years later is how rare that feels now. The internet got optimized. Everyone’s doing the same highly-produced thing, chasing the same metrics. The blogosphere of 2009—that chaotic, generative thing where interesting people could just exist and share what they made—that’s gone. These women probably moved on, got real lives, stopped posting. The form died.

But sometimes I’ll see an old photo and remember how it felt to find someone interesting by accident, to follow them because they were actually doing something. The redheads didn’t have anything in common except that they were talented and didn’t care about approval. That’s rarer than it should be.