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

“What if your life turned out to be what an ENTIRE GENERATION was dreaming of?”

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.”