When LesMads Ended
LesMads posted ten times a day. Sometimes more. When Jessica Weiß, Julia, and Schnati started in mid-2007, fashion blogging didn’t exist yet in Germany—or at least nobody had a name for it. It was just three women writing about clothes and taking mirror selfies in Berlin tower blocks on a website that shouldn’t have mattered. But it did. A publisher backed them. The fashion industry, which had no category for blogs, learned to take them seriously. Awards came. Thousands of readers. They became exactly as big as a blog could become.
Then Jessica left. Not because it failed, but because it had succeeded completely, which meant the only thing left to do was watch it become something else.
She’d wanted to be a writer as a kid. Then a TV presenter. Then somehow ended up running the most influential fashion blog in Germany. Looking back, it makes sense. She was smart and ambitious and could actually write, which put her way ahead of everyone else doing this at the time. But when she talked about leaving, she didn’t sound disappointed or bitter. She sounded like someone who’d finished. We accomplished everything. There’s nothing left. Done.
The work killed her first. Four and a half years of ten posts a day. Your love for something can carry you through insane hours for a while—you’re climbing, building, every post matters. But past a certain point the fire dies and what’s left is just the grind. She eventually made a rule: no posting on weekends. That was her compromise with having a life. That’s how far it had gone.
Then came the readers. When LesMads started, they shared everything—family stuff, actual thoughts, the real texture of their lives mixed in with the outfit photos. That’s what made it real, what made you care about what they were thinking. But readers multiply and a percentage of them are the kind of people who turn vulnerability into ammunition. You share something genuine and someone mocks it or uses it against you. After it happens enough times you stop sharing. You become professional. The diary becomes a platform and you’re not a person anymore, you’re a brand answering 150 emails a day from people who all want something from you.
The third thing was the other bloggers and the people who hated her. The ones who showed up the moment she succeeded. Blogs copying without credit and then resenting her for being more successful at it. Readers who felt rejected and turned that into spite. After a while you don’t even read the comments. You just know they’re there, and you know what they say.
So she took a job at Interview Magazine, running their online division. A completely new project, building from nothing. When someone asked if she’d do LesMads exactly the same way again, knowing what she knows now, she said yes. Immediately. No hesitation. Even knowing the cost. Even knowing how it would end.
That answer didn’t sit right. Not the choice itself—you can understand why she’d make it. The work mattered. It was real. But the I’d do it exactly the same
part, the complete absence of regret or hesitation. That sounds like someone who would burn the exact same way again if she had to. Maybe she will, in some other form.