What Stayed
I like going back through the old work. The pieces that opened something up, the ones you didn’t care about at all, the ones you read with real anger or longing. Looking back at them now is strange—you finally understand what actually mattered and what was just temporary noise.
There’s a girl—Giza Lagarce. Just another internet it-girl, but beautiful enough to spend time thinking about. Every few years one emerges—Cory Kennedy, Uffie, Sky Ferreira. Same trajectory every time. They burn bright for a moment, the drugs show up in the photos, the tabloids consume them, they’re gone. You can see it coming a mile away.
At the time she was just modeling, I think. Getting ready for the album, the music video, the rest of it. I remember thinking maybe she’d avoid the obvious path. Probably she wouldn’t. Probably like all the others she’d feed the machinery until it spit her out.
But I loved her. That kind of blind, time-limited love—the love you feel for a stranger, knowing it has an expiration date. I probably loved her more than anything.
I spent a lot of that era thinking about German blogs. The talent was there—real writers doing real work in fashion, music, tech, the actual stuff people cared about. But the design was aggressively, deliberately bad. Like no one had even considered it. All that thoughtfulness sabotaged by an aesthetic that didn’t exist. It was maddening.
Then you’d find someone like Tam Vibberstoft—22, Danish, making photos and videos and text and just letting them live. Not performing the exhausting labor of becoming famous, not feeding the machine that grinds up beautiful people. Just making work and leaving it there. A completely different energy.
And then there was the film. Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola’s. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson drifting through Tokyo. I’ve watched it more than anything else—twice back-to-back on a train once. Put it on for girlfriends over the years and they’d be asleep before it got going. The pacing didn’t work for them. For me it was everything—Tokyo became a place I needed to be, and loneliness became the only honest thing.
Those are the pieces that lasted. Not the ones that turned out to be right, not the ones that aged well. Just the ones that mattered when I found them, and somehow still matter now.