“What’s Her @?” - Brook Power
What Brook Power has built in Los Angeles is the kind of life that reads as effortless from the outside and looks, to some, like luck. She is unbothered by that assumption, largely because she does not read the comments, but she is clear about what the reality is.
The fuller picture is this: she built that life. With pure intention on her decisions, hobbies, and work life. She will be the first to tell you so.
We met Brook and her horse Pomp in the mountains of Santa Monica on a day that felt designed for exactly this kind of shoot. The light was the kind that makes everything look like it was always meant to be photographed. Brook moved through it naturally, on horseback, in four looks, across a landscape that felt entirely her own. Because in many ways, it is.
Brook is an LA native who grew up between the city and Hawaii, two places that, between them, will teach you to be comfortable in your own skin or not at all. She is a mother of two, a surfer, a horse rider, and someone whose relationship with the outdoors is less a lifestyle choice and more a language she has always spoken fluently.
She was two years old when her great aunt introduced her to a horse she had owned, one of her earliest memories, and something in her recognized it immediately. That is the kind of thing that does not leave you. It shapes the person you become, before you are old enough to understand what is happening.
She has been riding ever since.
"Maybe people think my life was always like this," she told us. "But I made my life like this. It was a series of decisions. I decided and I worked hard. I'm not some nepo baby."
There is something quietly powerful about a woman who is fully aware of how her life appears and completely uninterested in softening the truth of how it was built. Brook did not inherit this. She chose it; repeatedly, deliberately, and with the kind of commitment that does not make the highlight reel.
She also found her people by following what she loved. When we asked her how someone builds a genuine community in a city as sprawling and performative as Los Angeles, her answer was simple and entirely her own.
"You really need to nerd out with your hobbies and find your people. That's why we live in LA, there are so many beautiful places to go in nature."
It is the kind of answer that sounds obvious until you realize how few people actually do it.
Brook loves without overthinking it, without holding back. She described it not as recklessness but as a kind of fearlessness that she has simply always had.
"I don't think, I'm not apprehensive about who or what I love," she said. "I just go for it."
In a culture that has made an art form of emotional withholding, that kind of openness is its own kind of radical.
She is also doing the work that radical openness requires. Brook spoke with a disarming honesty about her childhood trauma and the ongoing process of rewiring the patterns it left behind.
"I have a lot of trauma from my childhood, as many of us do," she said. "I'm really trying to rewire my nervous system from having those pattern reactions to things. I'm just really trying to be very conscious when I can see myself falling into a reaction that has been programmed- and trying to undo that."
It is the kind of self-awareness that takes years to arrive at and even longer to act on. Brook is acting on it. That much is clear.
We closed the interview the way we close all of them; by asking Brook what she wants people to remember about her if they remember only one thing.
She did not hesitate.
"I want people to remember the way I made them feel."
It is the right answer. It is also the truest thing you can say about a person- that the impression they leave behind has nothing to do with what they look like or what they have, and everything to do with how they moved through a room. Brook Power moves through a room.. and a mountain, and a shoreline, and a life, like someone who has made peace with exactly who she is.
That is not something you inherit either.
The Team
Photography — Mr. Kandy
Brook Power is the second installment of “What's Her @?” a KANDYHOUSE original series featuring the models, artists, and creators who define the aesthetic of their generation. Watch her full interview on YouTube.