“Are you Laufey?”
A fan approached the table at an East Village cafe, hoping for a photo with Laufey (pronounced LAY-vay), the musician beloved by Gen Z listeners for her nostalgic combination of pop and jazz.
The woman dining there had the singer’s midsection, her mannerisms and her retro-femme clothing style. She was not Laufey, but her identical twin brother, Junia.
The fan quickly recovered: “Are you stealing all her shoes?”
This similarity comes in handy, Junia (pronounced YOO-nia) explained last month over eggs and kimchi on a thick slice of sourdough. She can test camera angles while her sister is hydrating before a performance, or check in for adjustments on the fly. And they wipe each other’s shoes.
“She just got new ballet flats from Chanel – of course I wanted to steal them,” Junia told the fan.
But Junia, 25, whose full name is Junia Lin Jonsdottir, is more than her famous sister’s body double. She works as creative director of Laufey and shapes the romantic visual style that the singer’s fans call ‘Laufeycore’. She has almost two million TikTok followers her own fashion recommendations and her occasional tours of Iceland, where the sisters grew up.
She is also a young person trying to strengthen her own creative identity, while her twin brother is in the middle of a professional breakthrough. So far this year, Laufey has won her first Grammy, attended her first Met Gala and sold out Radio City twice.
Gemini is often asked questions about jealousy and comparison, but even by those standards, Junia has been answering a lot of them lately. “I’m not jealous anymore,” she said. “I think I did that last year, when I had just graduated, and I felt more lost. For example, I was job hopping and she was building her career. But so much has changed in one year that I no longer have those feelings.”
Junia, who lives in London, joined her sister’s team full-time in January and is working to build the aesthetic side of Laufey’s musical empire. She plans album covers, music videos and performances, often via video calls with Laufey, who lives in Los Angeles, and the rest of her team.
It reminds Junia of the way the two improvised as children. “That’s how we played puppets together, and sometimes it feels like we still do,” she said.
Ballet flats in Iceland
The sisters grew up in both Washington DC and Iceland, their father’s home country, in a household made musical by their mother, a classical violinist who is Chinese. Junia said she had always felt like a stranger in Reykjavik, and sometimes insisted on walking to school in skirts and ballet flats, even though everyone else was wearing rain boots.
At the age of seven, Junia decided she wanted to pick up the violin because of an image on the cover of a workbook their mother had brought home. “There was a girl holding a violin, wearing white socks with ruffles and a little white dress with a red ribbon,” Junia said. “I thought, I want to be her, because I liked her outfit.”
She and Laufey attended the same schools, played in the same orchestras and eventually applied to all the same colleges, except Boston’s Berklee College of Music, where Laufey was accepted and studied music business. Junia left for St. Andrews, in Scotland. Their time apart was “like a personality growth spurt,” says Junia, who discovered a “feisty” sense of humor while studying international relations.
Junia studied music as a minor, but had no ambitions to become a professional musician herself. “I wanted to be a good, good kid who got good grades and went to law school or worked in finance or something,” she said. She loved music, but didn’t really see her place in it. “I just knew this was something I was going to give up.”
After graduating in 2022, Junia worked for four uninspiring days at a financial technology company. She then interned with the brand partnerships creative team at Universal Music Group, thinking she could pursue a career on the business side of the music industry.
Laufey had remained focused on music, including a 2021 EP: “Typical for me”, which she had released during her studies. (Junia took the Polaroid that appears on the album cover.) In the summer of 2023, Laufey’s career exploded, through a bossa nova-esque song that went from TikTok virality to late night TV.
Junia conceptualized one video clip for that song, “From the Start,” which was partially inspired by Scandinavian designers Arne Jacobsen and Eero Saarinen. The video has now been viewed more than 28 million times on YouTube. She soon took on more work, such as coming up with merchandise and studying old posters from the Montreux Jazz Festival to inspire art for Laufey’s upcoming tour.
Junia took weeks off from her internship to support her sister’s breakthrough, but it became untenable. Each sibling wanted to work full-time with the person she felt understood her vision on a cellular level. She left her internship at Universal last September.
“I think she really wanted to prove herself before she became ‘the sister,’” Laufey said in a telephone interview. Fans shouldn’t underestimate how much of Laufey’s public was influenced by Junia, she added. “Every visual thing you see is hers,” Laufey said. “Every photo shoot. She works with the stylist on every outfit. Every music video. Any coverage.”
Laufey said it was unlikely she would buy an item of clothing without running it through her sister. “She is my style icon,” she said.
‘It’s the clone’
On the sweaty afternoon when we met for lunch last month, Junia was visiting New York to help with her sister’s appearance on “The Kelly Clarkson Show.” She had worked with a set designer to envision an egg-shaped chair suitable for the bitter edge of Laufey’s song “Bored”: “Maybe you’re just way too vain to be interesting / Baby, keep talking, but no one’s listening .’
Junia wore a high-neck pleated blouse and Mary Janes to the interview, with Miu Miu sunglasses with honey-colored lenses. The sisters have chosen a style that is French and feminine, a mix of dreamy nightgowns and A-line dresses. It’s reminiscent of the 1950s and 1960s – periods also present in Laufey’s music – and avoids anything that could read like 1930s jazz club cosplay. “I have a strict no-vests policy,” Junia said.
The look has been enthusiastically adopted by the fans who stream into Laufey’s concerts, dressed more or less like the girl on the cover of Junia’s childhood violin workbook. One concertgoer joked that it was almost impossible to meet friends at a Laufey show because everyone wore similar bows in their hair.
“She’s really good at finding something, romanticizing it, and she just knows it’ll resonate,” Laufey said.
Junia can imagine a future working for a clothing or accessories brand, and she tries to strengthen her ties with the fashion world. She made the rounds at a launch event for Marc Jacobs and the Vivienne Westwood auction at Christie’s. She would like to be in the audience at future fashion weeks.
But she still plans to work with her sister as long as she can. She is not concerned about the collapse of the identities they have worked so hard to distinguish; instead, she spends a lot of time online making fun of her sister by biting her quesadillas after the show or make her take out the trash.
These insights into the everyday reality of siblings seem to be appreciated by the duo’s fans. In one TikTok video, Junia ventures out in a cheering crowd outside one of Laufey’s shows. “Stop the marching band!” she says. “It’s the clone!” They cheer anyway.
