The Tabs I Always Opened First
Before everyone had Instagram, they had a blog. 2010 was peak personal blogging—before the platforms swallowed everything, before "content creator" became a job title, when the internet still had corners you could fall into by accident. I kept a mental list. Women whose blogs I checked first thing, whose posts I read twice. These five were at the top.
Ivy Behrens was 21 and lived in Hamburg. Garden fashion shots, music videos she actually cared about, occasional eBay listings for things she’d grown past. A thousand girls ran nearly identical blogs that year, but Ivy had something the others didn’t—ease and genuine taste sitting together without effort. I had a crush on her that outlasted the blog.
Filippa Smeds was Swedish, reliably red-haired, the kind of face I felt obligated to write about whether or not anything new had happened. She’d moved her blog from Radar Magazine to a new platform, and I followed without a second thought. I nursed this ongoing fantasy about her visiting Berlin and me having some plausible reason to be in the same room.
Jasmin Arensmeier, 23, Stuttgart—tall, blonde, dressed sharply in every single photo. She ran two blogs simultaneously, which in retrospect seems both impressive and exhausting. I kept expecting her to break through nationally. Apparently she did.
Rachel Lynch was 19 and from Chicago and the one who genuinely short-circuited something. Party photos, city shots, self-portraits that went from casually gorgeous to explicitly, confidently hot. My one complaint: she kept digitally removing her nipples from the best photos, which seemed like a waste of everyone’s time, including hers. Bad Rachel.
Jessica Weiß, 24, Berlin. The queen, simply. Her blog Les Mads was already one of the most-read fashion sites in Germany, and I had genuine respect for her—not the vague kind you project onto internet-famous people, but the kind you feel for someone who built something with discipline and taste and made it actually work.
Most of those blogs are gone now, or abandoned, or dissolved into Instagram accounts with a different energy entirely. That version of the internet is over. I’m not sentimental about it in any general sense—but I miss those specific five tabs.