Palina and the Girls Worth Watching

Palina Rojinski has always been the kind of person who makes you feel like you’re missing the party she’s at. The Russian-born, Hamburg-raised TV host, DJ, and general cultural force was the face of adidas Originals’ News For Original Girls platform in its second year, which meant she got to spend her time sitting down with interesting women and calling it work. In the "Palina meets" segment she talked to Bonnie Strange, Berlin’s most reliably chaotic it-girl—a woman who treated her own image like an ongoing art project with no curator and no exit strategy. That pairing, Palina’s warmth against Bonnie’s controlled disorder, produced the kind of watchable tension no amount of brand strategy can manufacture.

The platform also had LCMDF floating around its edges, the Finnish sibling duo making the kind of glitchy pop that sounded like it was recorded somewhere cold and carpeted. Nora Tschirner showed up too, with that specific quality some German actresses have of seeming too sharp for whatever they’re appearing in while making you forget to mind. And Beyoncé was mentioned, because it was 2013 and Beyoncé was mentioned everywhere, by everyone, as a reflex.

The columnists drafted in—Nike van Dinther from This Is Jane Wayne, Ariane Stippa from Primer & Lacquer—were doing actual writing, which was more than most brand content operations managed. The sponsored platform disguised as editorial was still a relatively new trick in 2013. People hadn’t yet developed the specific exhaustion that comes from pattern recognition. It felt, if not innocent, then at least not fully cynical. Those two things are different. The distance between them is where all the good stuff was.