It started to feel like a lie to myself, like I’m
not being fully who I should be at this time.”
Searle was blindsided. “I knew he was dis-
turbed by something, but I never suspected
that it was something that would aect our
future together,” she says. Still, her experi-
ence with her mom’s coming out made her
acutely sensitive to his suering. The day
after Williams broke the news, she wrote
him a letter and left it on the dining table.
It told him how much she loved him, that
she respected his decision, and that although
she realized it would dramatically change
their relationship, honesty and transparency
were more important.
“Did I ask myself what was real, or if I was
living in an alternative reality?” she says.
“Where I’ve landed is that our love was real,
and that we were the right people for each
other at the time.” They took three or four
weeks to hash out the logistics before Searle
moved back to Portland. “Do I ask myself if
it would have been better if he had told me
who he was from the beginning?” she asks.
“I like to think our babies are the answer
to that.” Before she left Denmark, Searle
became pregnant again. Their daughter, Vi,
was born in the fall of 2016.
Despite their initial reluctance, the Bisch-
os also came to see their time in Copenhagen
as a great adventure. But once they were all
installed in that big, chic oce on the city’s
main shopping street, the inancial pres-
sures that had worried them soon came to
a head. “From the early days with this busi-
ness, our mindset had always been, How can
we continue bootstrapping our way and not
bring in outside capital partners,” says Doug
Bischo. “But quickly after we got to Copen-
hagen, with the new ofice and additional
overhead, we began to feel quite pressed with
our cash ow. And so the nancial stress veryquickly became heightened.” That pressure
convinced the partners that they needed to
seek an outside investor, and coupled with
all the personal upheavals, contributed to the
Bischos’ and Searle’s decisions to sell their
shares and step away from Kinfolk in order
to pursue other projects. The process proved
grueling, and the stress and conicts undid
Williams and Doug Bischo’s friendship.
“He was my best friend, he had been
there for everything. He was a rock through
the ordeal with Leo, sleeping on our sofa for
ve weeks, because he didn’t want to leave
us alone,” Williams says. “It was just busi-
ness that did it. It just”—for once, his voice
falters, and he pauses to collect himself—“it
just severed us.”
They have not spoken since they signed
the papers dissolving their partnership.AS THE PEOPLE behind it changed, so too did
the magazine. “The core themes remain cre-
ativity, care, and community,” says editor in
chief John Cliord Burns. “But the approach
is perhaps less prescriptive now than in previ-
ous phases of the magazine’s history.” One
fairly recent issue of Kinfolk includes a fea-
ture on utopian architecture, a prole of the
brooding indie singer Sharon Van Etten, and
a meditation on peaches that, in fewer than
500 words, manages to make reference to
Caravaggio, Thomas Hardy, and Call Me by
Your Name. Except for the tiny line of text at
the bottom identifying brands, the fashion
spread looks like it could be an outtake from
some obscure Nouvelle Vague lm. There is
not an avocado toast or Edison bulb in sight.
The Bischos—all ve of them now—live
in Southern California, where Doug works as
a consultant on business strategy and mar-
keting. Searle lives in Portland with the now
three-year-old Vi and works as a consultant
and grant writer for nonprot organizations,
though she’s faced more personal loss there.
Last spring, her new partner died in a caraccident. Williams and Searle are still on
good terms, but the person with whom he
now shares his heart is his boyfriend. And
although his new investor was supportive
of his desire to take on new projects, Wil-
liams eventually found himself pushing up
against the limits of Kinfolk itself. So when he
was approached by the CEO of Indigo, the
Canadian bookstore chain, he found it hard
to resist. “Over 10 years, we took Kinfolk from
this start-up to a well-oiled machine,” he says.
“It had been a long time since I had my hands
in the dirt. I was ready for a new challenge.”
Kinfolk still publishes quarterly from its
sleek gallery space in Copenhagen with a print
circulation of 75 , 000 and 295 , 000 monthly
online page views. The staff is smaller,
though—three full-time and three part-time
in Denmark, and another four elsewhere in
the world. Williams remains a partner of Kin-
folk, but in June, he signed on as Indigo’s chief
creative ocer and moved, together with his
boyfriend, to Toronto. He is now in charge of
designing the brand identity for a company
with more than 6 million customers in the past
year and 199 outlets across the country, many
of them sprawling “superstores” that also sell
gifts, housewares, electronics, and fashion.
It’s hard to imagine a less Kinfolk-ish place.
Yet for Williams, it makes sense. “We’ve
been doing focus groups, asking our custom-
ers, what are your pain points,” he says of the
new job. “And they are exactly the ones we
were addressing at Kinfolk. People say, ‘I’m
so connected digitally but I feel a total lack of
real connection. How do I nd the balance?
How do I nd a community?’ ”
At different times in his life, there have
been things—important things—that Williams
has suppressed: his doubts about the Mormon
church, his sexuality, his grief. And even now,
when he talks, in that slow, deliberate voice of
his, about a brand helping assuage people’s
pain by, well, selling them things, it makes you
wonder how much pain he allows himself to
experience. But if there is one thing this latest
chapter suggests, it’s that Nathan Williams is
authentic in his quest for authenticity.
Back before he launched a magazine
that would help dene a generation’s aes-
thetic—before the magazine printed on
heavy stock, and the cunning dinner parties,
and the hand-tailored clothes, and perfect
Instagram lters—back when he was just
a kid growing up in small-town Canada,
Williams used to hang out at a bookstore
with friends—the same one that is owned by
the corporation for which he now works.
Both geographically and spiritually, then,
there’s something about this latest phase
that feels like coming home.
“I think he seems very happy. He’s got the
nancing in place now, he met a beautiful
man that he loves, he gets to travel all over the
world,” says his friend Lentz Andersen. “It’s
like a good old H.C. Andersen fairy tale.” QA Kinfolk gathering near Sydney, September 2013.APRIL 2020 113JO
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