A
UTHENTICITY, PERFORMANCE; BRAND, product;
myth, reality: When it comes to the 33 - year-old
Williams, it’s unusually dificult to separate the
strands. He is unfailingly polite and considerate,
possessed of a humility and a lack of guile that seem almost
shocking in this age of branding and fake news. And yet he him-
self is so intensely curated—from his passions to his precisely
tailored clothing—that it can be hard to see him as entirely real.
“We are the same height and have the same posture,” says
his friend Frederik Lentz Andersen, fashion director for the
Danish magazine Euroman. “We’re both super slim. But every
time I see him, I think, How can that suit
t you so perfectly?
There’s never a aw to anything he does. It’s like he never slips.”
Kinfolk’s origin story seems just as perfect, a charming myth
crafted along the lines of one of those old Rooney-Garland,B
BEFORE HE ANSWERS a question, Nathan Williams pauses for
longer than is strictly comfortable. He does not run a hand
through his strawberry blond hair, nor does he twist the art-
fully rustic bronze cu on his wrist. He does not
ddle with the
silk triangle tied jauntily around his neck and dyed the exact
shade of dark navy as the rest of his well-tailored ensemble.
He does, however, blink slowly. If the question is of a personal
nature, he may do this several times so that, initially, you read
this response as panic—a classic deer-in-the-headlights look.
But between blinks, he will hold your gaze, until inally the
blinking comes to seem less like protection and more like
consideration, a weighing of something—perhaps your trustwor-
thiness, perhaps his own. In this as in all things, the cofounder
of Kinfolk—the magazine that helped to codify, and in the pro-
cess become shorthand for, a certain kind of Instagram-ready
millennial aesthetic for an impressive stretch during the last
decade—is acting with intention.
“I’m not used to talking about these things,” he says, a few
pregnant pauses into our conversation about the magazine’s
complicated history. “I want to make sure I get it right.”
Kinfolk is famously about intentionality, about a kind of
wholesome slow living that exults in deliberately curated
moments, carefully selected objects, and, as its twee tagline
once read, “small gatherings.” Like all lifestyle magazines, it
tracs in aspiration, and if, in the past eight years or so, you
have found yourself craving a precisely sliced piece of avoca-
do toast, or a laundry line from which to cunningly hang your
linen bedsheets in the sun-dappled afternoon, you probably
have Kinfolk to thank for it. But the seductions featured on
its pages have always been aimed as much at the soul as the
body. Through intention, Kinfolk’s austerely beautiful pages
whisper, lies not just a pretty room or a lovely out
t, but a truer
expression of the self, something more meaningful, more, as
the marketers now put it, authentic.
That there might be inherent tension in an authenticity
that depends on buying the right leather apron or arranging
a bunch of wildowers just so is a notion that does not seem
to trouble Williams. But perhaps that is because of the other
tensions, the ones that would tear apart the small band of
intimates who helped him found the magazine; the ones that
would erupt within his own measured soul. It was certainly
nothing compared to the trauma that lay ahead, and would
strip away the well-curated façade to, ultimately, reveal who
he really was. Because although it would not be accurate to say
that the Nathan Williams who started Kinfolk was living a lie,
neither was he living in truth.
PICTURE PERFECT
Katie Searle and
Williams on a shoot.
Kinfolk helped make
intentionality a
millennial watchword.100 VANITY FAIR
RA
NSOMLT
D.;PREV
IOUS^ P
AGES:FRANNEVOIGT