Four Years and Out
Jessica Weiß told me she used to write short stories as a kid. Then music television arrived and she decided she’d be a presenter instead—once she stopped just rewinding videos to learn the choreography. It’s a good origin story for someone who ended up running Germany’s most influential fashion blog, because it has the same restless shape: find the thing, throw yourself at it, then figure out what’s next.
When I spoke to Jessica in the fall of 2011, she was leaving LesMads as its last founding member. She, Julia, and Schnati had started it in mid-2007, back when German fashion blogging was essentially three people and a bathroom mirror. Within a few years they’d built something the print industry couldn’t ignore, won awards, and gotten Burda to back them—which turned a shared obsession into an actual job. Then Julia left for Condé Nast, Schnati stepped back, and Jessica ran it alone long enough to realize she’d gotten everything she’d set out to get.
What struck me most was how clear-eyed she was about the machinery of resentment that success generates. The haters, she said, were never random—they were almost always people who’d been turned away at some point, whose links she hadn’t posted, whose emails she hadn’t answered in the avalanche of 150 messages a day. I had to learn to deal with that side of it,
she told me, with the tone of someone who has genuinely processed it rather than performed resilience. The German fashion blogosphere, she added, had a particular strain of this—people who copied without linking, who watched sideways instead of building anything. She compared it unfavorably to what Leandra Medine was doing with The Man Repeller, or what Into the Gloss would become: work that had an actual point of view rather than just taste-aggregation.
The Burda question came up, as it always did. People had built a whole narrative around it—that LesMads only worked because of corporate backing, that the girls hadn’t really earned it. Jessica’s answer was precise: yes, Burda helped. No, that’s not a thing to apologize for. They still had to fight for every inch of credibility with designers and agencies and press offices who didn’t understand what a blog was or why they should be on the invite list. The backing gave them resources; it didn’t give them the voice. Those are different things.
She’s from the Ruhrpott, the industrial belt of western Germany—a place that metabolizes arrogance badly. She described herself as genuinely hard to impress, which seemed true. The Lead Award moved her. The Grimme Online Award nomination moved her. The daily work of it, the ten posts some days and more on others, the deadline pressure she’d somehow trained herself to love—that she was more ambivalent about. That pace isn’t sustainable over the long run,
she said, and after four and a half years it had stopped feeling like velocity and started feeling like inertia. At some point she banned herself from posting on weekends just to remember what stillness felt like.
The thing she’d miss, she said, wasn’t the desk or the backend access or any of the infrastructure. It was the people. Which is the right answer and also a true one, and I believed her when she said it. She and Julia were still talking every day despite the noise that had surrounded Julia’s departure. We’re very good friends,
she said, and not a day goes by without us communicating.
That’s the kind of thing you say when it’s actually true—there’s no performance value in it if you’re trying to save face.
What she was walking toward: Executive Editor Online at Interview Magazine’s German launch, a job where the website didn’t even exist yet. Which is the perfect next move for someone who built their career on the premise that the format matters as much as the content—that where and how you say it is part of what you’re saying. Four years building something from scratch had given her exactly the right preparation for building something from scratch again.
She said she’d do it all exactly the same way. I believe that too.