When Los Angeles enters its seasonal identity crisis—caught somewhere between solar flare and spiritual retreat—you can find Aaliyah Mendes doing something radical: slowing down. In this city, the calendar is almost certainly double-booked, Instagram feeds refresh faster than your pulse, and the light burns more like a spotlight than a sunrise. Mendes moves through it as if on a different metronome, each choice measured, each step deliberate—a revolt against the pace that promises relevance only to those who dare to keep up.

The algorithm tells her to post or be forgotten. She ignores it. Mendes is in the business of slowness—a strange and almost subversive choice in a media ecosystem that rewards the quickest, loudest, most persistent hands in the room. In the four weeks since her last YouTube upload, she’s heard the little algorithmic whisper in her ear—post, or they’ll forget you—and she’s ignored it. “I don’t want to create just for the sake of having something up,” she says. “If I’m not inspired, I’d rather just disappear for a little bit.”

Mendes has been visible online since she was 9, part of the early Vine generation, long before her sense of self had the chance to fully develop. Those looping seconds, back when the internet felt looser, became the first frame through which strangers began to know her. She was the kid with an iPhone camera before she became the woman with an ethos, and even longer before the full weight of the public’s curiosity settled on her. Being Shawn Mendes’ younger sister meant the frame was never entirely hers. Over the years, her audience has shifted, contracted, expanded, and shifted again. And somewhere in that flux, Mendes began to question the premise of keeping up at all costs, giving everyone what they want, all the time, and whether she wanted to at all.
“I’m always just reminding myself, like, you’re going to have a fan base that’s going to come from association with your brother, and maybe it’s not going to derive from, ‘Oh, what’s her creations?’ You’re going to bring in your own community,” she tells me. “It’s going to land for people, it’s not going to land for others, and that’s why we’re such diverse human beings.”

She says this without heat, as if she’s handled the words often enough that the sharpest edges have worn down. It’s the steadiness of someone who’s made up her mind—the noise can exist without her participation. She’s filtering without calcifying, making room for multiple selves: the woman building a wellness framework, the 21-year-old still finding her footing, the public figure, the little sister, the private friend.

She pauses. “I’m going to attract the people I’m meant to attract. I’ll filter out the people who won’t resonate.”

Part of her discernment has come through sharing her reproductive health journey on TikTok—a decision she describes as both instinctual and ongoing. “For years, I learned how to perform wellness without showing the days I was curled in bed, in pain, or bleeding through my sheets,” she reflects. “You can post a sexy selfie and still be a menstrual health advocate. They’re not opposites.” Her viral period videos were never a strategic play, but the overwhelming response made her realize: “There’s so much space in this field that is so long overdue. If I can change the narrative slightly from periods or menstrual health being taboo, or wellness looking highly aesthetic or trendy, and just say, no, it’s real… that’s it.”

This insistence on wholeness also means making space for all her identities at once. “I kind of actually want to be Aaliyah the model, Aaliyah the wellness influencer, Aaliyah the relatable girl, Aaliyah the crier. I just want to be my most authentic self, even when it doesn’t make sense to the algorithm.”

Her work reflects that multiplicity. She co-hosted Phase + Flow, a women’s wellness dinner in New York earlier this year, centering menstrual health and hygiene through shared care and conversation. Her YouTube uploads arrive like postcards, often weeks apart, small enough to be held in the palm of your hand. Viewers write to her about watching her videos while getting ready for work, or before bed to calm down. She smiles at the symmetry: she does the same with her own comfort-watch channels—hours-long camping videos where almost nothing happens. “People are yearning for grounding,” she says. “We’re all looking for ways to slow down, to feel present. My videos just happen to be one of the ways people do that.”

Two months ago, she left Toronto for Los Angeles. It wasn’t her first time in the city—she’s been coming for years during the pandemic, after breakups, seeing family, in moments when she needed reprieve. The move could have been an aesthetic pivot, an attempt to slot into LA’s influencer economy, but Mendes treats it as an extension of her slow rebellion. She speaks of the geography—beaches, canyons, mountains—as part of her wellness practice, the same way she talks about lemon-mint tea or her infrared mat. The city’s abundance of breathwork studios, ice baths, and saunas has also inspired her to think about physical spaces she’d like to create for her audience. “I want to use my space to support something greater than myself,” she says. “How do I uplift other voices? How can we coexist in the space I’ve been given and share that spotlight?”

Mendes is 21, newly graduated, still learning the contours of adulthood in real time. She is, simultaneously, the friend you’d ask for a tea recommendation and the figure strangers might hold to impossibly high standards. The position is curious—half guide, half fellow traveler. Her audience looks to her for wellness rituals, for a slower way of living, for proof that opting out of the rush is possible. At the same time, she is learning the same things they are: how to set boundaries, how to navigate a new city, how to trust her own decisions without needing constant validation.
“It’s interesting,” she says, “because people see you as a source of knowledge, but you’re still learning in real time. I’m not miles ahead of the people watching me. I’m growing at the same pace they are. The difference is that my voice is visible.”

The tension between urgency and instinct is a constant hum. Sometimes she can tell which voice she’s listening to; sometimes she can’t. “The truth will always find you,” she says finally, as if landing on something she’s been circling. In her case, it circles back to the same thing: moving slowly, even when it looks like you are falling behind.

She imagines her future as a blend of digital and physical work: a lifestyle brand rooted in softness, sustainability, and slow media; live events where conversation moves at the speed of trust; collaborations that reflect her sense of care. She wants loungewear and home goods that feel like an exhale. She wants content that you watch the way you’d watch a fire burn down to embers.

And so, as Los Angeles burns through another late-summer heatwave—always half-here, half-somewhere-else—Mendes is here to remind us that speed is not the only proof of living. She will lose followers, she will gain them back. She will post a video and not hesitate to vanish for a month. She will drink her tea. She will lay on her infrared mat, clear the static. She will call her best friend. And when she does appear on your screen again, it will be because she has something she wants to give—not something she owes.

“I can be your mirror for connection,” she says. “You can find it in your own world, and we can share it a little in a digital way. Everyone just wants to be loved and cuddled and connected. If my work can be that reminder, that’s enough.”

Photographed by Selah Tennberg

Styled by Michy Foster

Written by Melanie Perez

Hair and Makeup: Sydney Oprita 

Production Assistant: Zoe Swintek