The Garbage Dump and the Fan Shrine

Time moves fast when you’re surrounded by people making things. There’s this moment where the little network stops being yours alone and suddenly there are new projects spinning off, new people joining in, and you realize something’s actually happening.

One of them is basically a digital garbage dump, and I mean that as a compliment. Pictures get thrown up, videos get tossed in, someone writes a sentence. It’s fashion and random provocation and whatever catches someone’s eye at three in the morning. The aesthetic is pure chaos—modish girls, weird juxtapositions, Avril Lavigne’s nipples existing on the same page as something genuinely unsettling. There’s no curating, no overthinking it. Someone took one of our stickers and put it to use in a way that made us immediately know these people got what we were doing.

The other project is the opposite: completely focused, a shrine really. Filippa Smeds, this Swedish model who’s twenty-one and beautiful in a way that photographs actually capture. There’s something about supporting someone like that in real time—watching the development, the shots, the slow accumulation of presence. It feels like we’re documenting something while it’s happening, giving it a place to live that’s entirely her own.

Both things appeal to me in different ways. The first one because it’s pure appetite without apology. The second because it’s single-minded admiration, the kind where you can track a person’s rise without irony. They exist on opposite ends of the same spectrum—one says yes to everything, the other says yes to one thing completely. Neither one is trying to be anything but what it is.