Matchbook (not), debuted online. That coincided, as Portlandia
so memorably satirized, with a new generation of DIY’ers.
“Seeing how it spread globally kind of astounded me,” Searle
says. “It was really powerful to see the map where we would hot-
spot what was happening all over the world.” By 2014 , the mag-
azine had been syndicated in Russia, Japan, China, and South
Korea. The founders had launched Ouur Media, a creative
agency, had started a video series, and had published a book:
The Kinfolk Table. They also started a series of “gatherings”—
dinners or other events designed to bring the Kinfolk-minded
together for some IRL communing. And all of it articulated in an
aesthetic so sharply dened, you could slice sourdough with it.
“The Martha Stewart Living of the Portland set,” is how the
New York Times referred to the magazine for a 2014 prole. Two
years later, Forbes named Williams one of its “ 30 Under 30 ,”
and Underscore magazine compared him to Lena Dunham,
noting that if the Girls creator was the “voice of her genera-
tion, then Williams is the eye of his.” “Sometimes a publication
catches a moment and crystallizes a certain thing that is hap-
pening culturally,” says Marc Kremers, founder and creative
director of Future Corp, a London-based digital design agency
that works with magazines. “It’s going to be a mirror to that
moment—it sees it, formats it, and delivers it in a beautiful
package. That’s what Kinfolk did.”
That’s not necessarily a good thing, according to Kremers.
“It’s tasteful to a fault,” he says of the magazine. “There’s noth-
ing oensive, nothing that hurts your eyes, nothing that stands
out. It’s very beige. An AI bot could probably churn out the
same stu very easily.”
For the founders, that kind of criticism was missing the
point. “I always tell people that Kinfolk is both an aesthetic and
a worldview,” says King. “A lot of people only focused on the
aesthetic.” For the partners, Kinfolk wasn’t something they put
on—it was their life. Searle was mystied
by the way that part of the brand—the
ethos—got lost. “I had people coming up
to me and asking how do I join, as if there
were some kind of exclusive member-
ship,” she recalls. “And I would say, No,
you just do it, you just invite some people
over for dinner.” But even actual dinner
turned out to be complicated.
When Kinfolk launched in 2011 , Insta-
gram was just nine months old. In many
ways, the two media converged perfectly, each seemingly
made for the other. It wasn’t long before millennial feeds were
lled with the Kinfolk aesthetic; even with images of Kinfolk
itself. “Somehow—I don’t know how—the magazine became
popular for social media,” Williams says. “Taking photos of it
on a coee table, in a café, on the bookshelf—it just exploded.
We started seeing lots of signature Kinfolk photos—like the
cone with owers coming out of it to look like ice cream—pick
up traction and also go o on social media.”
The entrepreneur in him was pleased to have hit a nerve, but
the soft-spoken man who loved Thoreau and was trying to say
something about what mattered most to him was saddened.
“There were hundreds of thousands of posts that were tagged
#kinfolk or #kinfolklife, but readers were receiving it as just a
photo of a pretty table or an overhead shot of a cappuccino,” he
says. “It became a beast that we had no control over.” The same
held true for those Kinfolk gatherings. “The whole point was to
create a real community, but they weren’t connecting at all,”
he recalls. “People were just showing up to get a post for Insta-
gram. We had to start asking them to put away their phones.”
So ubiquitous a signier did Kinfolk become that parodies
popped up to satirize what they took to be its bland, elitist, and
exceedingly white omnipresence. One site, the Kinspiracy,
simply collected the copycat images from Instagram and pub-
lished them beneath the tagline “Kinfolk Magazine: Making
White People Feel Artistic Since 2011 .”I
T’S NOT UNCOMMON for people to characterize
Williams as unlike anyone they’ve ever met. “You
know how people will describe someone as ‘quiet,
but when you get to know him, he’s really deep?’ ”
says King. “With Nate, it’s actually true. He can sit with silence,
he can sit with space. He allows others to approach him. And
then, he doesn’t so much unfurl as blossom.”
“People just want to be near him,” is how Searle describes
it, which is exactly what Lentz Andersen, Euroman’s fashion
director, remembers feeling when he rst met Williams a few
years ago at a party. “There’s a contrast there, in that he’s both
extremely quiet and extremely charismatic. I’ve worked in this
industry for a long time and know a lot of people. But I’ve never
met anyone like Nathan.”
Yet charismatic is not the rst word that leaps to mind upon
meeting him. Williams comes across as sincere and direct,
though there is a dreaminess to him that seems at odds with
the steely determination beneath. And he is reserved in a way
that makes his emotional range, at least in interviews, seem
limited. There is certainly no triumphalism, and not really
even much pride in his voice as he recounts Kinfolk’s early
successes. And when he talks about the cracks that began toappear, they too are relayed with an evenness that makes you
wonder if he is either repressing something or is just much
more enlightened than the rest of us.
Within a few years of the magazine’s launch, both Searle
and Williams were struggling with their faith. It wasn’t an
entirely new sensation for either of them; Searle’s parents had
divorced when she was very young, and her mom, with whom
she is very close, came out as a lesbian and left the Mormon
church herself. Williams’s upbringing was more orthodox; he
had grown up in a small, predominantly Mormon town in Can-
ada, and his family was devout. But the two years beginning at
age 19 that he spent on his church-ordained mission unleashed
some doubts. He was assigned to a district in Los Angeles,
and although he worked hard and appreciated the discipline,
the spiritual aspect rang hollow. “I think that if you’re truly
convicted with your beliefs and you CONTINUED ON PAGE “It became A BEAST
that we had no control over.”
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