Musical Mirroring
In the below video for Mary Komasa’s song “Lost Me,” a mournful-looking Anja Rubik hangs her head as she prepares to walk another runway. All eyes are on her, from the cold faces in the front row to the flashing mess of photographers. Komasa appears behind the cameramen at the end of the runway. As she sings, Rubik begins to mouth the words alongside her: “We both chose to stay blind, swallow lies, but now it’s done.” Although Komasa is nude, she motions unzipping a dress at her side. Rubik follows suit and her dress drops to the floor.
Although “Lost Me” is Rubik’s third appearance in a music video, it is the first time she’s been fully involved in the creative process. Together, Komasa, Rubik, and Komasa’s filmmaker brother, Jan Komasa, developed the video’s concept. “We spoke about a lot of things that I do and the time in my life that I’m in, and Jan started to build this concept of the video. We added on ideas—what we felt was right, what message we wanted to pass. We all worked very much together on every element of the video,” Rubik says over the phone from Paris. “We did create a vague mood board, but we were very set on our idea. The idea was driving the whole process; it wasn’t that we looked for inspiration.”
The song’s message feels personal for Rubik, too. “It’s this urge of liberation,” she explains. “It’s personal in my sense, but everyone at some point can find themselves in a very similar situation,” she continues. “Everyone can find themselves stuck—stuck in their head or stuck in a relationship or a job or a state of mind. You have this need to break through, and in order to do that, you have to find this courage inside of you.”
In Rubik’s native Poland, the Komasas are a well-established creative family: Mary’s other brother is an opera singer, her sister is a costume designer, and her father is a famous actor. It was after Rubik collaborated with Komasa’s sister that the model and musician first met. “I knew Mary’s music and I really loved her voice,” Rubik recalls. “Her sister said, ‘You should meet Mary’ because you’ll get along really well.” A creative force herself—in addition to modeling, Rubik runs her own magazine, 25—Rubik found it “empowering” to work with the Komasa siblings.
