Postcard from Laufey Land
An interview with Junia Lin, Laufey’s twin sister and aesthetic mastermind.
Junia Lin Jonsdottir was in her kitchen in London when she logged onto our Zoom meeting. Her hair was tied up in a bun, and she wore a gray collegiate-style hoodie with her first name printed in towering crimson across the chest. At that moment, she was preparing hard-boiled eggs — 7 minutes for a perfectly set yolk — which she then sliced and arranged atop bread with cheese. “This is very Icelandic,” said Junia, who is 25 and partly grew up in Reykjavik, flipping her phone camera around to show me her handiwork.
Junia’s biggest fans on social media will know this: The girl loves eggs. When she was in college at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, she would bring hard-boiled eggs to the club, because (a) they are a perfectly portable snack and (b) clubs have bars, and bars have salt. These days, her preferred eggs come from Burford Brown hens in England’s pastoral Cotswolds region. They’re a splurge, but the yolks are beautiful.
“Last year, my ex-boyfriend took me to the Cotswolds, and the one thing I wanted to see was these chickens,” she said, starting to laugh. “I wanted to see these chickens who made my favorite eggs. But we didn’t manage to see them. And that’s why he’s my ex-boyfriend.”
If you don’t know who Junia is yet, I’m thrilled to introduce you. Her identical twin sister and best friend is the Grammy-winning musician Laufey, whose sentimental, swooning take on jazz has enchanted a generation of young women. With her breezy confidence and habit of humbling her sister for comedic effect on TikTok, where she has 2.1 million followers, Junia has become a beloved figure — both within the Laufey universe and in her own right. “I’m feisty,” Junia said, when I asked how she and her sister are different.
Junia is also one of Gen Z’s rising tastemakers, thanks to her role as Laufey’s creative director. “I’m sort of like the vibe police,” she explained. She watches over aesthetic matters, weighing in on everything from styling and set design to music videos and merch production. Laufey’s music is nostalgic and transportive, with lyrics that are relatable to anyone who’s been young and yearning for love (“Everybody’s falling in love and I’m falling behind,” she sings in one of her most popular songs). When I listen to her music, which is as earnestly romantic as an old movie and comforting as a cup of tea, I feel like I’m cozied up at Café Lalo in You’ve Got Mail, string lights sparkling outside.
The visuals round out the dreamy experience. Just look at the music video for Laufey’s recent cover of “Santa Baby,” which is set on a theater stage, as though at a local Christmas talent show. It’s filled with old-fashioned decorations, ballerinas, and boxes of presents. Laufey wears a big smile and a little white capelet with fuzzy pom-poms. Bill Murray emcees and operates the lights, looking tired but supportive.
And, look, it is so nice to be carried away to Laufey’s dream land. Her music blew up online during the Covid lockdown, when all that many of us wanted was to be magically whisked away from our dreary circumstances. She has released two albums since then — 2022’s Everything I Know About Love and 2023’s Bewitched — but the spell has only grown stronger as the world has reopened. This year, she won the Grammy for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album.
What does a day with the vibe police look like? After our call, Junia planned to go to a café with a friend and prep a mood board for an upcoming project. She makes a lot of mood boards — probably two or three a week — in order to communicate the look that she’s targeting for a particular project, be it a music video or vinyl packaging. Then she would be going to a work dinner, followed by calls with Laufey’s Los Angeles team regarding merch.
Junia likes to be on the ground, going to museums for research and meeting with creative partners. One such collaborator is graphic designer Katie Buckley, who created the opening titles of Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn. They worked together on the design of a crest for the Laufey Book Club, which hosts Discord chats, runs bookstore events, and sells merch. (The hoodie emblazoned with Junia’s name, a gift from her sister’s team, is a one-off version of a Laufey sweatshirt sold by the book club.) Buckley devised a beribboned insignia filled with elements of Laufey’s story: a snowflake for Iceland, rabbits representing the twins’ Zodiac sign, a bass clef because she is a cellist.
Junia plays violin, and on tour, she often accompanies her sister onstage for a song or two. Then it’s back to tapping away at her laptop in the green room or razzing Laufey on TikTok. Of that unusual mix of activities, Junia said, “Touring is truly when I cannot explain what I do for a living.”
If Junia is good at building aesthetic worlds that people aspire toward, it’s because she’s a visually-motivated dreamer, too. “Everything I’ve done genuinely has been ruled by whether I think it’s aesthetic or not, which is sort of wild,” she told me. She wanted to go to St. Andrews, for instance, because she was intrigued by its castle-like architecture, which was so different from anything she had seen in Iceland. “I wanted that experience of going to this college that had history and heritage and cool merch and one of those old seals,” Junia said. “I’d probably just read The Secret History.”
And as a child of the internet, she understands how online communities can provide a welcome sense of escapism. When she was younger, she ran online games based on the Hunger Games and Harry Potter books, assigning teams, houses, backgrounds, and personalities to participants. Similarly, the Laufey Book Club crest wasn’t just a branding exercise — in Junia’s view, it was a way of inducting fans into a secret collegiate society, with all the pride and history it implies.
If you want to get on Junia’s wavelength — if you want to get swept away to her dream world — go watch some Wes Anderson and Studio Ghibli movies. Check out the fairytale dresses made by Rodarte and the styling work of Leith Clark, who now works with Laufey. Investigate modern expressions of femininity. Right now, Junia is really enjoying the popularity of ribbons and bows: “Samantha Parkington is one of my biggest muses,” she notes, name-checking the most fabulous of the American Girl dolls.
In fact, she’s grateful that, in recent years, fashion designers have made it socially acceptable to dress like an American Girl doll. “Let me just show you what I mean,” she said, marching to her closet.
“Like, this is allowed,” she said, revealing a plaid, toffee-colored dress with puff sleeves.
“This is allowed!” she said, flicking over to a white look with a high, ruffled neckline.
“And, oh my god, this one — I feel like Samantha would have worn this. This is allowed,” she said, pulling out another high-necked number, navy this time, with stripes of lace running down the front.
The culture does allow it. But, as her influence on Gen Z’s aesthetic landscape grows, I’m not convinced that Junia really needs to get sign-off from some higher power. More and more, it’s allowed because she says it is.