Five Women the Internet Was Made For
No man online performs purely for himself. The profile photos, the hardware purchases with touch screens, the maintained high scores in games nobody asked about—all of it, if you’re honest, is performed in the specific hope of being noticed by exactly the right woman. These were five of the right ones.
Angela Nguyen was seventeen, from a small city in western Germany, and posted her photography under the name Emilia Coeur—the pseudonym giving her an online identity that felt deliberately invented and therefore entirely her own. Her work had a particular compositional sensibility that didn’t look like anything else in the German blogosphere at the time, and she spent her nights on Skype with the local nerds who followed her, which felt like a fair exchange.
Lea Rieck, twenty-three, built a Munich fashion blog called Pale Is A Color with Sylvia Weber, and argued through photographs rather than manifestos that pale is, in fact, a color—and a whole aesthetic position besides. She had the specific sensibility of someone who only shops at places nobody has found yet.
Teresa Bücker was the Berlin redhead who made me read more carefully. She wrote for multiple outlets simultaneously, including Der Freitag, with a voice too sharp to stay in any one corner of the internet. She still owes me something considerably more than a polite kiss, for reasons I’m choosing not to document here.
Jessie-Lynne was twenty-five and from Chicago, modeling for GodGirls and similar outlets—taking her clothes off professionally, which is a career that sounds simple until you consider everything it actually requires. She kept a blog with a writing voice that made you want to read even on days she wasn’t posting photos, which is the highest compliment I know how to give.
Juliane and Anna ran Reigen together from Berlin—a fashion blog the industry actually took seriously, one that attended every show and wrote about it with enough authority that the people running those shows paid attention. I couldn’t decide which of the two I found more interesting, so I just kept reading both. That was the whole trick of it—you never quite decided and just kept coming back.