Marcel Winatschek

A New URL Worth Gathering Around

Jessie built LesMads into something that mattered, then moved on, then came back—which is how you know someone is serious about the medium rather than just about the platform they happened to build on. Journelles was a month old at this point, and already doing what it was supposed to: fashion coverage written by people who actually cared about fashion, which sounds obvious until you’ve spent any time reading fashion blogs.

Alexa, Hanna, Julia, Kerstin, and Jessie were the crew behind it. The launch party was at Picknick Berlin—Palina Rojinski, DJ Kim Kong, Ari & Uzi, Cannibal Koffer playing live, Katja Hentschel photographing. The usual circuit, assembled with intention.

Blog launch parties were a specific kind of cultural event that existed for maybe five years, concentrated in cities like Berlin and London—a window when a new URL was still worth gathering around, when the idea of a writing collective had enough density to fill a room and call it a scene. Most of what launched with that kind of fanfare is gone now. Journelles outlasted most of them. That counts for something.