How King Princess and Quinn Wilson Found Love in the DMs
This story is part of GQ’s Modern Lovers issue.
“I love your work,” Mikaela Straus, the 22-year-old musician known as King Princess, once impulsively sent into the direct-message abyss while staring longingly at Quinn Wilson’s Instagram avatar. For her part, Wilson, the 27-year-old, Minneapolis-born director, had recently been introduced to Straus’s music through a friend. “I was not flirting,” says Wilson about her swift reply, which read, “Hi, Miss King.”
In a matter of days, the two moved their conversation off-screen and to a small restaurant in Silver Lake, Los Angeles. Straus recalls being struck by how cute Wilson looked when she arrived in “just a sweatshirt and big glasses.”
Wilson was hesitant. “[Mikaela] had to use a fake ID to get a drink… I was like, ‘How old are you?’ ” (Straus, who says she “probably showed up in just baggy jeans,” was 20 at the time.)