From Berlin, With Something to Actually Say

I was following Masha Sedgwick back when she was total emo. We were all total emo—the hair, the eyeliner, the afternoons spent hanging around train stations watching life move past at a deliberately tragic pace. It was a phase with actual feeling in it, which is more than you can say for most phases.

She’s 26 now and one of Germany’s most-read fashion bloggers, which is a sentence that risks underselling her. She writes about clothes and coffee and hair, but she also writes these long, considered pieces where she actually thinks something through on the page. That combination—the casual and the earnest sitting next to each other without embarrassment—is harder to pull off than it looks.

When she told her parents she was going all-in on blogging, she got the faces. I saw so many questions in their faces, she said. But instead of holding on to century-old traditions, we should focus on what we’re actually good at and what we actually want. Maybe in the future the only way to earn money will be through passion and dedication. That last part lands differently now than it might have even five years earlier—it’s either a genuine shift in how work can function or the kind of thing that sounds true right up until it doesn’t. Masha seems to be making it true, which counts for something.