Digital Cover: Benjamin & Bianca Reborn

Benjamin Ingrosso doesn’t instantly recognise his sister. It is, after all, the first time she’s ever had bangs or, for that matter, facial piercings (they’re temporary, not unlike those on recent Givenchy and Junya Watanabe runways). In fact, Benjamin, also sporting a nose ring, nearly introduces himself before it dawns on him. “Oh my god, Bianca!” he exclaims.

It’s an unusual reaction; Bianca Ingrosso is one of the most recognisable women in Sweden. With 1.3 million followers on Instagram, her own talk show, a slew of well-advertised, high street design collaborations (Bianca for Gina Tricot, Bianca’s Intimissimi edit, etc) and a wildly successful cosmetics company, Caia, she’s quite literally unmissable – one can’t take the subway without seeing her face plastered on the walls. Benjamin, meanwhile, is similarly embedded in the culture; his songs all over the radio, his food-centric talk show, Benjamin’s, common water cooler (or Twitter, rather) fodder. The Ingrosso siblings are virtually inescapable.

And, when you’re so ubiquitous, so visible, everyone has an opinion – some half-baked notion of who you are – and some of those opinions are less-than-kind. This is especially true in Sweden, where Jantelagen reigns supreme. To that end, Bianca and Benjamin’s willingness to put themselves out there, to stand apart from the crowd in a wide variety of arenas, is specifically and boldly un-Swedish. But if you really want to know what Bianca Ingrosso is like, you’d best ask Benjamin. And vice versa.

“We’re basically twins,” says Bianca, who turns 28 in a couple of weeks. “We always say that…”

Benjamin interjects, “…We were made at the same time.”

“But he was kept in my mom’s belly for two and a half years more,” Bianca says.

“I was chilling,” Benjamin concludes. The twin energy is palpable.

It’s lunch break on our digital cover shoot and Benjamin, Bianca and I are sitting at a tucked away table at Stockholm’s Under Bron nightclub. I’ve never seen the space in daylight; the decor is surprisingly considered – the candy pink walls, the Gustaf Westman ‘Curvy Mirror’ in the adjacent restaurant. Both siblings are eating salads from health-conscious restaurant chain Kale & Crave, Benjamin’s a hearty mix of veggies and grains and Bianca’s quite literally called “Bianca’s Special Salad” (an off-menu twist on the Thai Chicken available at any Kale & Crave location. Their cousin, Sebastian Ingrosso, also one third of Swedish House Mafia, co-owns the joint). From time to time they’ll each grab a forkful from the other’s bowl without comment.

They weren’t always this close. “I hated him for 17 years,” Bianca says, in that sarcastic, big sister sort of way. She clarifies, seriously now, “We weren’t as close as we are today when we were little. In fact, I was so annoyed by him most of the time.” Benjamin shrugs in nonchalant agreement.

I ask them to elaborate. Growing up, the sibling duo were wildly different, with Benjamin assuming the true-to-himself artistic type and Bianca the prototypical popular girl. “He was bullied and he was always in his own world,” Bianca explains. “You were ashamed,” says Benjamin. Still, somewhere beneath the surface, Bianca looked up to her brother. Here was someone that was unafraid to stand out, the sort of kid who would show up to school “playing the character of” Superman or John Travolta or Austin Powers – strutting down the halls with dramatic swagger. The bullying persisted but Benjamin never wavered. “My mindset at the time was that people don’t get it now, but they will,” he says. Meanwhile, Bianca’s prime motive was to fit in.

Something shifted in 2014, when Benjamin appeared on Let’s Dance, Sweden’s iteration of Strictly Come Dancing and Dancing with the Stars. Watching episode one, Bianca was predictably embarrassed by her brother’s performance. But as the season went on and Benjamin emerged as a standout, she began to see “his true personality come to life” in a setting where he could “bloom to the fullest”. By the time he was heading off to the finale, she was all in. She gave him the “first hug in many years” – a good luck hug – and he won (Bianca, for the record, placed second in the competition two seasons later).

If coming around on one’s sibling as they compete in a nationally televised dance competition feels unrelatable, that’s nothing compared to the rest of this origin story. For those uninitiated in the Ingrosso lineage (though if you live in Sweden, you undoubtedly have at least a passing knowledge of, if not a full-fledged connection to, the Wahlgren-Ingrosso family), Bianca and Benjamin’s maternal grandmother, Christina Schollin, is an actress best known internationally for her performance in Ingmar Bergman’s iconic Fanny and Alexander. Her husband, Hans Wahlgren, is also a prolific actor, appearing in countless Swedish film and stage productions since the mid 1940s.

Christina and Hans’ daughter, Pernilla Wahlgren – Bianca and Benjamin’s mother – began following in her parents’ footsteps early on (a young Pernilla appears in Fanny and Alexander, too), becoming a bonafide superstar in film, theatre and music (her 1985 pop anthem Piccadilly Circus is still a bop). While performing in national music competition Melodifestivalen in the mid ‘80s, she met and fell in love with an Italian background dancer named Emilio Ingrosso (who would go on to become a successful restauranteur with several popular eateries in Stockholm and Mallorca). The couple married, had three children – not necessarily in that order (in addition to Benjamin and Bianca, there’s older brother Oliver, a successful DJ and music producer in his own right). Then, in 2002, came the nasty, incredibly public divorce.

The year her parents divorced was the same year that Bianca realised her family was, well, a bit different. She was in kindergarten, walking with her class someplace when she noticed something odd. “All of the newspapers were about our parent’s horrible divorce trial,” she says. In fact, the entire country was discussing her family. Bianca recalls her friend’s parents telling her “what side they’re on” (most were on her mother’s).

It’s not that Benjamin and Bianca were unaware of their parent’s outward-facing careers – they had been touring with their mother since they were infants and sometimes she came to pick them up from school straight from the theatre, dressed as Pippi Longstocking – but it was their first taste of public opinion. And public opinion was not very nice (eventually their father, so fed up with the Swedish tabloids, moved back to Italy).

There was never really a time when Benjamin and Bianca weren’t getting into the family business. The first time Benjamin took the stage, at Avicii Arena (then called Globen), he was four years old. “I was playing Mowgli at my mom’s Christmas concert,” he says, as if it’s the most normal thing for a four-year-old to do in the whole wide world. “I was never nervous. [The stage] was my favourite place on earth.” But even an Ingrosso isn’t immune to an awkward phase, and at 15 or 16, he started to doubt himself. Around that same time, the Facebook and Instagram comments started rolling in. That’s also when the first “hate page” came up on Facebook; it accrued about 15,000 followers, many of them adults. “Benjamin has been bullied not only from friends in school, but the entire country,” says Bianca.

So he shifted his emphasis to songwriting, a pursuit in which he found more confidence. “I’ve never seen myself as a singer, more of a songwriter who sings his own songs,” Benjamin says. It’s not like he ever stopped performing – he won Melodifestivalen, the very contest at which his parents met, with his song Dance You Off (also a bop) in 2018 and went on to represent Sweden at Eurovision. Most of his lyrics are personal – a breakup in his early twenties yielded a slew of songs (Costa Rica, for instance, reveals that she left him for a surfboard instructor). It was only “like, half a year ago” that he first felt confident in his own singing voice. Today, the ubiquity of his music cannot be overstated: in 2021, his album En gång i tiden (del 1) debuted in the top 10 of the global Spotify album charts and at this year’s Grammis, Benjamin took home the top prize: Artist of the Year.

Around the same time that Benjamin came into his voice, something else clicked. He had “always been obsessed with food” – YouTubing recipes, making tiramisu with his father – but it was only amid the pandemic that he started eating out in Stockholm “every day”. “Sometimes I do, like, four restaurants for dinner,” he says. Come again? “I start somewhere, I eat one dish and then I go to the next place…” (in case you’re wondering, his record for restaurants visited in one evening is 20). The passion culminated in Benjamin’s, the recently launched variety show in which he invites Swedish celebrities to eat, chat and perform. The show, which earned Benjamin an award for Best TV Personality at Kristallen earlier this year, will soon return for a third season.

Bianca, on the other hand, didn’t take to performing in the traditional sense the same way her brother did. She did the theatre stints (sometimes alongside Benjamin) and the Junior Eurovision Song Contest (she performed with a friend – they placed second). But she found more success in showing off her god-given charisma and utter lack of filter – two ingredients that make the perfect social media and reality television star.

Wahlgrens värld, a Keeping Up with the Kardashians-like reality television show that centred around Bianca and her mother Pernilla (other family members, Benjamin included, dipped in and out) debuted on Channel 5 in 2016. Bianca’s grandmother, Christina, in particular, is a fan favourite on the series – wacky and uninhibited. The three generations of Wahlgren women captured the attention of generations of viewers. And while its success is quite singular in Sweden (in 2018 it nabbed Best TV show at Kristallen. That same year Bianca and Pernilla shared the prize for Best TV Personality), Bianca’s relationship with the show over her 10 seasons on screen is complicated.

“I started filming when I was trying to get to know myself as a young adult,” Bianca says, adding that at the time, her relationship with her mother was strained. “We were up privately until four in the morning fighting, and then at seven in the morning the camera crew came in and [my mother] was a totally different person.” Pernilla is a professional actress, after all.

Bianca, on the other hand, “cannot fake”. “I cannot have a different persona or go into a character,” she says. “If we’re doing this, it’s going to be real and this is me. I’m mad, I’m PMSing, I’m on my period, I’m super annoyed with everyone.” Against the kind, patient persona portrayed by her mother – already a beloved national icon – Bianca could often appear as a bratty teenager: entitled, unappreciative or worse. “I just didn’t really land well,” she admits. Bianca announced she would not be returning to the show at the end of 2021.

But, during the show’s run, Bianca found her voice on social media, a landscape where her unfiltered nature and sarcastic humour flourished. She can still recall her first post on Instagram. She was in her early teens, on a bus, “a bit drunk” but also “a bit fake drunk”. “You know when you fake drunk?” she asks. Anyway, she and her friends were on their way to Elverket in Lidingö. “It was a nightclub for teenagers where you made out with, like, 35 people,” she explains. One half-drunken post of Bianca and her friends and the rest is history. Three years ago, she leveraged her expansive following to launch Caia Cosmetics.

Bianca’s interest in makeup was sparked backstage, at her mother’s theatre productions. “I was always in the makeup room,” she says (Benjamin, on the other hand, was more interested in pulling the curtain, watching performances again and again from the side of the stage). “I was always helping the artists – helping my mother if she was late. Organising the makeup.” As Bianca grew older, though she had access to the most extravagantly priced beauty products, not all of her followers did. So in 2018, she introduced Caia (it’s named for her alter-ego – a bonafide, decision-making boss), a mostly-vegan cosmetics line offering desirable products at accessible prices. Last year, the brand surpassed 300 million Swedish krona in turnover and they’re on track to beat that this year. And, per her makeup tutorials, few can contour a face with more expertise than Bianca.

It’s not as if Bianca’s career as an influencer and beauty mogul hasn’t had its pitfalls. It still has its pitfalls, actually. “My sister experiences more of the social media hate now,” says Benjamin, who seems to have escaped his adolescent haters and emerged as a generally well-liked, shockingly well-adjusted guy. “Imagine having 1.3 million followers and everyone thinks this or that.” Bianca weathers it all with impressive fortitude. “If there’s someone who can take it, it’s me,” she says, adding that this climate of overwhelming public opinion is really all she knows. “I’ve seen my family getting torn apart – you either love us or you hate us.” Last year, when online Bianca hate was at a fever pitch, Benjamin released the song Smile, an anthem dedicated to his sister. He sings, “I see me when I'm lookin' at you, we both know all the things we've been through”.

Both Benjamin and Bianca lay this all out – the unusually public childhood, the bullying both in-person and virtual and their unprecedented successes – as simple fact. They’re the first to acknowledge their privilege. “We’ve had doors being opened,” says Bianca. “But it’s really tough when the door is open to really f***ing show what we can do. The standards are super low or super high.” Do they have any regrets – a show they wish they hadn’t appeared in, a social media post they wish they could take back, an outfit they would have rather burned? “I never regret stuff,” says Benjamin. Bianca agrees… sort of. “I didn’t know you couldn’t just put powder on your skin, you have to put concealer, right? So I looked really patchy,” she says. “We both look back at how ugly we were.”

The sibling duo anticipate a mixed response to this photoshoot – at this point, they always anticipate a mixed response. Sure, it makes them both a bit nervous, but their ultimate mentality is: “F*** it”. Shortly after they arrive in front of the camera, Bianca and Benjamin settle into their looks, fittingly inspired by the twin expressions on the runways of Gucci and Sunnei. “They look badass,” a bystander on set (okay, me) whispers.

Through everything, their Vogue debut inclusive, it helps to have one another to lean on – after all, who could better understand the experience of being Bianca Ingrosso but Benjamin and vice versa? “You have one person, and he’s my person and I’m his person,” Bianca says, noting that this singular closeness can sometimes rub each other’s romantic partners the wrong way.

“We’re each other’s soulmates.”