48 this is brended

about a year ago i was on a plane between berlin and new york, doing what i always do: sorting my camera roll into folders. they grew to over fifty, each with hundreds and thousands of images. it gives me a sense of control, for a brief moment when i look at the neatly organised grid. but then? where does it all go? a hard drive once i retire this phone? what even is the cloud that i am paying for, trusting a concept i don’t even understand to hold the memories of my life. for a long time i was too insecure about my content to think about it as anything beyond content. in therapy i work on my (in)ability of being proud of what i do. i can’t even look the therapist in the eye when i get asked the dreadful question “why do people follow you?”, a question to motivate me to say something positive about myself. i hear “if it were so easy as you say, wouldn’t everyone have this? if you did what everyone can do, why is it you that is getting these opportunities?”. sometimes we pivot away from me if my hands get too sweaty. we focus on what creativity means. because i always insist that what i do is not creative. i consider hard work to require hours. i type this kind of text within five minutes, a funny instagram caption takes me 2 seconds, a carousel post about 3 minutes. that can’t be work. i struggle walking out of work events thinking, i can’t believe i just got paid to be there. i also don’t like when someone’s hands are shaking from nervousness when they meet me, i am not doing anything special. but still, we try and define creation. making something when there was nothing, even if it’s just an iphone picture, a mirror selfie, it is creation. is creative. and i am proud. you see an image of a hand holding a black boot over concrete floor, and you recognise who took it, if you are part of a certain niche corner of the internet. and i do own a little real estate on here with my visual language, that i can be proud of. i own an aesthetic, and i love the word influencer, even if no one likes to be called that but me. i am a person of influence, what i say goes for a few thousand people. and i have managed to not just survive this hellscape of the internet for a decade, but i thrive. but i assume i am the only one actually scrolling down on my own feed every once and again to admire the content, to take inspiration, while everybody else is looking at the next thing and the next thing. are we slowly moving out of attention era, will we focus more on relevance, recognisability, community? are you interchangeable? do you get referenced? i know deep down that i am not interchangeable, even if i downplay my work in hopes to be liked. i often say things of quality have no fear of time, but my camera roll does. i fear the cloud. i am representing the new guard, but i love legacy. i love print. so here is a book.

it’s called brended, and i just showed a first preview here.

the goal was to have something physical in my hands. and i wanted this to be a recognisable piece of design. you go to someone’s house and you see the raf simons book. the helmut lang book, you recognise it by its shape. it says something about a person, that they care about certain things. my goal is that brended is that, for a small group of people. a beautiful object to have in your house. it has 600 pages of my memories, i could talk ten minutes about each page.

this project was done entirely independent with no publisher or sponsoring from any brand, brended is self funded. i had the most amazing help of @_elsamueller who art directed, designed and helped me sort through over two thousand images. i am doing a launch event in paris this week, infos coming asap. then more cities afterwards. brended world tour coming!

if you want to get involved, stock brended in your store, support the tour, write about it, you can email me b@brendahashtag.com or dm me if you consider me a friend :) we have limited stock because my funds were not endless but the opportunities are!!!!

thank you to @patriziabartolini for all your support and @manyforms for always having my back and all my loves for keeping brended a secret for a year. you’re all in the book.

i did a thing!!!!!! lmao

thank you for all your support, on whichever platform, i see you and i appreciate you and i am so proud of my life and my career and the community that we are building.