From the Magazine
April 2020 Issue

How Kinfolk Magazine Defined the Millennial Aesthetic…and Unraveled Behind the Scenes

The cult quarterly helped set the pace for the upwardly mobile, Instagram-perfect 2010s lifestyle. Off the page, its creators’ lives have been somewhat messier.
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SELF, PUBLISHED
Nathan Williams, cofounder of the cult lifestyle magazine Kinfolk, in its offices in 2016.
By Franne Voigt.

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 artfully rustic bronze cuff on his wrist. He does not fiddle 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 finally the blinking comes to seem less like protection and more like consideration, a weighing of something—perhaps your trustworthiness, perhaps his own. In this as in all things, the cofounder of Kinfolk—the magazine that helped to codify, and in the process 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 traffics in aspiration, and if, in the past eight years or so, you have found yourself craving a precisely sliced piece of avocado 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 outfit, 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 wildflowers 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.

Authenticity, performance; brand, product; myth, reality: When it comes to the 33-year-old Williams, it’s unusually difficult 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 himself 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 fit you so perfectly? There’s never a flaw 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, “Hey gang, let’s put on a show” musicals. At the turn of the last decade, while still in college, two young married couples have the kooky idea of creating a magazine. A few wholesome—they are Mormon—high jinks and one social media revolution later, they find themselves at the helm not just of a successful publication, but at the vanguard of a veritable movement, a zeitgeist-defining, social media-friendly tidal wave that swathes an entire generation in muted linen, pour-over coffee, and gratitude. #Kinfolklife #Flatlay #Blessed

There was a lot that appeared in those early pages that was an accurate expression of the lives of its young founders. Nathan Williams and Katie Searle met in 2008 while both were students at Brigham Young University’s Hawaii campus—he developed a crush on the quiet, luminous girl after passing the desk where she worked every day. It would take him some time to get up the nerve, as he recalls, to ask her to leave her boyfriend and date him instead. Searle insists she already had broken things off with his predecessor. But both agree that she said yes, and then yes again, a few months later, when he led her into the forest and, beneath a bower of carefully strung fairy lights, asked her to marry him.

An assignment for an entrepreneurship class had the two of them dreaming up an e-commerce platform, which they called Kinsfolk & Company, for selling plates and glasses and other things you might need for a sweet little dinner party, and that, combined with contributors Williams had gathered through a blog he kept, and help from their close friends, Doug and Paige Bischoff, gradually morphed, in 2011, into a tiny, very DIY magazine, focused on food and the “small gatherings” they all loved. They had no publishing experience and no defined roles at the time; everyone just did everything. “We all lived in married student housing, so when we weren’t in class, we spent a lot of time together,” says Doug Bischoff. “We’d go to Nate and Katie’s apartment, and they’d be at ours regularly. We were always getting together to cook, and hang out, and just enjoy each other’s company. We had a really, really good friendship.” Williams and Doug Bischoff even looked somewhat alike; both of them tall and lean, with short blond hair worn in a neat side part, and a predilection, even then, for sharper clothes than might be entirely normal for your average college student.

The theme for the first issue was inspired by a line from Thoreau’s Walden: “I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.” Williams so identified with the book that he handed out copies to friends at his birthday party. Kinfolk volume 1 included an article on fika, the Swedish coffee break so in vogue now, and on teatime—rituals that would be incorporated into Kinfolk’s office life. “It was really simple, really basic, but what I thought was sweet at the time,” Williams says. “And yeah, it was far too kitsch and cutesy. But there was this correlation there.”

From the start, Kinfolk pulled in millions of page views, a response strong enough to convince the Williamses and Bischoffs to sign on with a San Francisco-based publisher to help with printing and distribution. By September 2012, Kinfolk was selling tens of thousands of copies per issue at a cover price of $18.

The two couples moved to Portland, Oregon, which in addition to being near Searle’s hometown had the added benefit of a large population of aesthetically minded millennials eager to express their creative identities through a well-curated table setting. Yet even once Kinfolk had a real office and began hiring a real staff, the fairy-tale quality remained. “Nathan would bring in new bread he had baked,” says Nathan Ticknor, who started working as service manager in 2013. “We had our teatime. At Christmas, we would all go out and chop down our office Christmas tree together.” When Georgia Frances King showed up to interview for her job as editor, she was invited to join a staff party held on nearby Sauvie Island. “Everyone from the office was there sitting on the beach in the sunshine, swimming, and eating watermelon slices with feta and rosewater,” she recalls. “I thought, Shit, it’s real.”

What if your life—maybe shot in better light, maybe a tiny bit beyond your financial reach, but still, in essence, yours—turned out to be what an entire generation was dreaming of? “Two thousand eleven wasn’t that long ago, but when Kinfolk popped up, it seemed fresh and new,” Williams says. “It was the first original-concept publication focused on community, on coming together around a shared table, on slowing down. I think it resonated because it offered an antidote to the huge digital presence in our lives. As a company we recognized that the more time we’re on our phones, the more of an appetite we have for real connection.”

PICTURE PERFECT
Katie Searle and Williams on a shoot. Kinfolk helped make intentionality a millennial watchword.


Ransom LTD.

It was a strange transitional moment for lifestyle magazines. The great die-off had occurred just a year or two earlier, shuttering old stalwarts like Gourmet and Metropolitan Home, as well as livelier new titles like Domino and Plenty Magazine. A few of the more niche publications that rose in their wake, like Modern Farmer and Cereal, lay a couple of years in the future. But by 2011, there was definitely a need waiting to be filled, as survivors like Architectural Digest and Elle Decor shook up their mastheads and a number of upstarts, like Rue (still around) and Matchbook (not), debuted online. That coincided, as Portlandia so memorably satirized, with a new generation of DIY’ers.

Launched in 2011 as an outgrowth of a college project, Kinfolk immediately reflected—and championed—the earnest DIY aesthetic then in vogue with many millennials. Sometimes it did so to the point of parody. The New York Times called it “the Martha Stewart Living of the Portland set.”

“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 magazine 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 defined, 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 profile. 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 generation, then Williams is the eye of his.” “Sometimes a publication catches a moment and crystallizes a certain thing that is happening 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 nothing offensive, nothing that hurts your eyes, nothing that stands out. It’s very beige. An AI bot could probably churn out the same stuff 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 mystified 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 membership,” 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, Instagram 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 filled 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 coffee table, in a café, on the bookshelf—it just exploded. We started seeing lots of signature Kinfolk photos—like the cone with flowers coming out of it to look like ice cream—pick up traction and also go off 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 Instagram. We had to start asking them to put away their phones.”

So ubiquitous a signifier 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 published them beneath the tagline “Kinfolk Magazine: Making White People Feel Artistic Since 2011.”

It’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 first 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 first 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 to appear, 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 Canada, 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 feel the importance of them, then of course, converting someone would be very gratifying and rewarding,” he says. “I didn’t feel that. I was doing it to do my mission.”

Among the many rules for missionary behavior is a strict ban against traveling outside of the geographic boundaries of one’s assigned area. It is perhaps telling that, although he says he was never rebellious, Williams broke that rule in his own way.

“I went to the Getty,” he says, then pauses. “A few times.”

In hindsight, he sees that period as the origin of his discontent with the church. But it wasn’t until after the launch of Kinfolk that he and Searle decided to break with it. King remembers the moment she realized that Williams was no longer upholding some of the church’s key practices. “Nathan and I were alone in the office working late, under a deadline. He silently slid a glass of wine onto my desk. And then without saying a word, walked back to his office with his own glass in his hand, turned, and smiled at me.”

Doug and Paige Bischoff remained active in the church, and although they were saddened that their friends’ decision meant they would no longer share a religious life (“There were tears,” Williams recalls), it didn’t undermine their friendship. “The four of them were a pack,” recalls King. “They were so close and intertwined. Friendship, romantic love, familial love—it was all wrapped together. They were their own community.”

And yet. Although he couldn’t fully articulate why, by around 2014 Williams felt like he was at a breaking point. Kinfolk was doing better than ever; its print run had soared to 75,000 for the U.S. edition alone. But its creative director felt suffocated. “There was so much energy going into something that wasn’t what I wanted it to be,” he says. “I was absolutely convinced I needed to be somewhere else.”

He meant it literally. The founders agreed that Kinfolk’s headquarters should move somewhere more cosmopolitan than Portland. The team examined the obvious options—Paris, London, New York—but Williams had his heart set farther afield. “Copenhagen is Nathan’s soul city,” Searle says. “He felt so connected to everything about it. It was one of the first places that felt like home to him.”

Click to Enlarge

Photos by Josephine Schiele.

Click to Enlarge

Photos by Josephine Schiele.

From a business perspective, the Danish capital made a certain amount of sense. Kinfolk’s pared-down aesthetic owes a clear debt to Scandinavian style, and the magazine and agency already worked with a number of photographers and designers in the region. But there were serious obstacles as well. Nordic taxes and salaries would make producing the magazine far more expensive than it had been in Portland. And they would all be far from home, from the friends and family who constituted their support network.

Searle had doubts about the wisdom of the move but quieted them by chalking it up “to one last adventure before we settled down and had kids.” The Bischoffs had two small children by then. As the two partners in charge of the operation’s bottom line, they had a far more intimate knowledge of the financial pressures than Williams did and were even more concerned.

“The other partners knew either I was going to make a change,” Williams says, “or I was out. And for them, that would mean losing their company. It was not a great, ‘cheers’ moment. They agreed, but they also made it clear that if it backfired, it was my fault.”

After eight months of uncertainty (and one very Kinfolk-esque going-away party complete with crayfish boil), the team was finally installed in Copenhagen in the summer of 2015. Williams felt, he says, “like I had refilled the tank.”

How do you know who you really are? It’s impossible to say whether the magazine changed Williams, or Williams changed the magazine. Even before the move, both had gradually grown more worldly while retaining a tone of guileless sincerity. (Issue 17, the last published from Portland, reassured readers that it was okay to carve personal space from their relatives.) But the identity that Williams had constructed for himself would not survive the transition, or the trauma to come.

At the time of the move, Searle was four months pregnant. After a routine ultrasound, Searle and Williams were referred to a cardiologist who made an offhand comment about the baby’s heart defect. “I was pretty far along at that point, so the doctor just assumed that we knew about it already.” But that was the first time they learned the baby suffered from a syndrome that would require him to undergo multiple surgeries before he turned two; if their child, whom they would name Leo, survived, he would likely not reach his 20s. Most parents who learn their baby has this condition decide to terminate the pregnancy, the doctor informed them. Searle and Williams could choose to do the same, but because the pregnancy was so advanced, they would need to decide within 48 hours.

The couple had already concluded that the faith in which they grew up could no longer hold them. But they had never truly articulated—to themselves most of all—which beliefs they took with them. “It was as if a magnifying glass shifted onto my ethics,” Williams says of the intense hours during which they shut themselves away to talk out the decision in private. “Our office in Portland was neighbors with Planned Parenthood. I would drive past, and there would be picketers and protesters, but I never took time to chisel out that corner of my ethics. And within 48 hours I had to decide—we had to decide—how we actually thought about it.”

Searle and Williams had learned of Leo’s illness on a Monday; that Friday, Katie was induced and the pregnancy terminated. After, the distance that had emerged in their relationship worsened. As the pregnancy progressed, Searle had cut back on her work; now she withdrew entirely. Williams, meanwhile, threw himself ever more deeply into Kinfolk. He also began drinking more frequently. Searle, in therapy for her bereavement, didn’t have enough experience with alcohol herself to know how much was a problem. “It was only when I explained what was happening that my therapist said, ‘Oh, that’s an issue,’ ” she says.

Until the move, Williams and Searle had been, in his words, joined at the hip. “I think from our early days in school together we were on a shared crusade to just be who we were and pursue what felt right to us, regardless of how our school told us to behave, regardless of the expectations of our families.” But now, she couldn’t seem to reach him. At first she attributed the distance to his style of grieving, but at some point that ceased to feel convincing. One night, she insisted they talk about the thing that was eating at him, and it came out. He was gay.

NEW DRAFT
Within a few years of the magazine’s launch, both Williams and Searle were struggling with their faith.


By Franne Voigt.

“I hadn’t been planning to tell her then, and it wasn’t the glorious, self-enabling moment,” he says. “It was more ‘This can’t go on, for our relationship or for me.’ It was harboring a lie to myself and to her.”

It hadn’t always felt like a lie. “I was attracted to Katie, I was in love with Katie, I absolutely saw our future together,” Williams says. “That doesn’t mean I wasn’t also physically attracted to men, and that of course continued throughout our marriage.” For the longest time, he believed the attraction was only sexual and pushed it down. “It didn’t feel like shame. It was more like an absolute secret.”

But Leo’s death had an annealing effect on him, making the internal conflicts harder to tolerate. “Physical need or sexual desire is easier to suppress. But when it goes beyond that to feel like self-identity, that’s harder. 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 disturbed by something, but I never suspected that it was something that would affect our future together,” she says. Still, her experience with her mom’s coming out made her acutely sensitive to his suffering. 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 Bischoffs also came to see their time in Copenhagen as a great adventure. But once they were all installed in that big, chic office on the city’s main shopping street, the financial pressures that had worried them soon came to a head. “From the early days with this business, our mindset had always been, How can we continue bootstrapping our way and not bring in outside capital partners,” says Doug Bischoff. “But quickly after we got to Copenhagen, with the new office and additional overhead, we began to feel quite pressed with our cash flow. And so the financial stress very quickly 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 Bischoffs’ 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 conflicts undid Williams and Doug Bischoff’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 five weeks, because he didn’t want to leave us alone,” Williams says. “It was just business 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 creativity, care, and community,” says editor in chief John Clifford Burns. “But the approach is perhaps less prescriptive now than in previous phases of the magazine’s history.” One fairly recent issue of Kinfolk includes a feature on utopian architecture, a profile 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 film. There is not an avocado toast or Edison bulb in sight.

The Bischoffs—all five of them now—live in Southern California, where Doug works as a consultant on business strategy and marketing. Searle lives in Portland with the now three-year-old Vi and works as a consultant and grant writer for nonprofit organizations, though she’s faced more personal loss there. Last spring, her new partner died in a car accident. 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, Williams 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 Kinfolk, but in June, he signed on as Indigo’s chief creative officer 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 customers, 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 find the balance? How do I find 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 define a generation’s aesthetic—before the magazine printed on heavy stock, and the cunning dinner parties, and the hand-tailored clothes, and perfect Instagram filters—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 financing 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.”