The Redesign That Finally Fits

Seven years is a long time to run a fashion blog and still mean it. Nike van Dinther and Sarah Gottschalk started This is Jane Wayne as best friends with strong opinions about clothes, and somewhere along the way it became one of the better German-language fashion sites on the internet—the kind that holds its own next to Rookie or Polyester without reaching for either. When it works, it’s because the writing has actual stakes: opinions that could offend someone, a perspective specific enough to be real.

The site relaunched with a new design, and Nike’s announcement post about it reads as its own small essay on creative paralysis—the gap between what you want and what you can actually articulate. Months of talking around the relaunch in circles, ideas that wouldn’t resolve into decisions, conversations that kept not becoming commitments. We promised ourselves that Jane Wayne would become more multifaceted, more colorful, more beautiful, she writes, and you can feel exactly what it’s like to have said that out loud so many times it starts to feel hollow.

What she describes the new site feeling like—and I’m paraphrasing a sentence that runs very warmly and a little chaotically—is adventure, paper bags of sweets, cold cola, cyberspace, afternoon cake, room for big thoughts. Listed out it sounds like a mood board. In practice the design earns it. There’s an energy to the new layout that the old one had been slowly outgrowing.

Not many German-language sites have managed to build something genuinely worth comparing to their international contemporaries. This is Jane Wayne did. The relaunch is just the clothes finally fitting the body.