ISSUE 01: New year, old me

Those that know me know that I don’t mess about with new year’s resolutions. I will hard pass on your optimisation framework and your girlboss journal. January in the northern hemisphere is bleak enough, so far as months go, and women are already constantly made to feel like we’re not doing enough. So I don’t subscribe to the idea that a new year = radical reinvention.

But there’s been something in the 2025-26 shift that’s had me sitting up a little straighter this week. Maybe I’ve consumed too much Year of the Snake to Year of the Horse content over the holidays, but there has been a lot of old skin shedding happening for me recently.

In short, my 2025 sucked. I’ve spent the last year (at least) feeling really lost. It’s been a perfect storm of factors that’s had me in a minor career chokehold: a lack of creative inspiration and significant distaste for the vacuous TikTokification of the cultural landscape, a touch of imposter syndrome as my career has naturally progressed, and not least of which has been the threat of AI rendering us all completely irrelevant which has created a real sense of helplessness and left me a bit directionless.

I’ve bounced around from “solution” to “solution”, taking non-committal steps in one direction and hightailing it back another; I’m going to study interior design! I’m going to start a wellness startup! I’m going to sack it all off and teach Zumba! (don’t ask).

I’ve chased the wrong kinds of clients and convinced myself I’d feel fulfilled by a different type of work, all while wasting my time and money in the process. I’m ready to accept that I’ve come full circle. It might be a new year, but I’ve returned to an old me. Probably one that was there all along.

New year, old me

Anyone who has known me long enough knows that I once lived and breathed all things fashion. I hark from the era of the unpaid internship. This means I traipsed up and down a fifth-floor walk-up in New York’s Chinatown as a stylist’s assistant with a 50lb (when empty) trunk full of clothing samples to an odorous backdrop of ripening durian in the dead middle of the summer heat. Following that was the graphic design internship at Vogue, which saw 2am departures from the midtown offices during fashion week and living in ultimate fear of a corridor run-in with Anna. Did I mention this was all unpaid? Still, I loved every minute of it.

Next came London and the in-house roles with Net-a-Porter, Mulberry, Whistles, and Paul Smith that lay the foundations of my love of how true cult brands are built and my obsession with the psychology of people who buy them. Fashion is the ultimate non-commodity, and succeeding in this arena requires such a full adoption of the anti-laws of marketing, it’s astounding.

So why did I move away from fashion and luxury brands for a while?

Let’s face it, working in the fashion industry is far more ick than it is glamour. It can mean working ruthless hours for an often unliveable wage just because your soul should be fed by “the gratitude of just being there”. It’s like a too-cold ice cream sundae riddled with artificial sweetness, chunks of it’s very own type of caste system laced throughout, and topped off with the cherry of one’s connections often meaning more than one’s talent. I felt I was ready for something different.

So for these, and other unnamed reasons, I left the fashion industry to embark on something I felt would be more fulfilling – teaching graphic design. It was here that I encountered something wholly unexpected.

I was made to feel like I should be embarrassed about a fashion background. As if experience in fashion as an industry suddenly meant my entire career was surface-level or irrelevant. Or that working in-house rather than exclusively for design agencies made my understanding of design less than. Of course, this wasn’t the shared opinion of everyone I came across, some of my best friends are from that season of my life. But I often felt it was just a general underlying hum in the up-its-own-ass world of trendy graphic designers in London.

So I downplayed it. I tried to shake my roots (and my talents) to appease, to make apologies, or to fit in. Sadly, this meant I went entirely against the advice I give my clients when it came to my own brand. I scrambled around strategy-less, and I chopped and changed my visual approach and tone of voice countless times in order to chase work that I didn’t feel necessarily aligned with, and now I’m over here wrist-slapping myself for the years of inconsistencies.

The teaching itself was incredibly fulfilling. For a while. Yet that obsession with building brands kept rearing its head. Ultimately, teaching aspiring creatives the taste and tools they need to create visual language, while watching so many of them forget to set the foundations of why a certain visual language should exist, became infuriating.

Thankfully, I’ve come to realise that working behind the curtain to help build some of the world’s most iconic, relevant, and cultworthy luxury brands isn’t something to downplay.

It’s a fucking superpower.

It has strengthened my understanding of what a brand needs be to successfully build a world that people want to live in and belong to. My lean towards luxury signalling isn’t just taste or visual preference. It’s a deep-rooted understanding, perspective, and talent. And today, it means I know what it takes to turn creative storytelling into commercial success and how to build emotionally resonant, culturally aware brands that people connect with.

So while I haven’t fully solved the TikTok cultural crisis and I’m still working out how exactly to make AI my bitch (more on that in next week’s newsletter), I now know the imposter syndrome I’ve felt wasn’t for a lack of skill or talent or relevance. It was because I was, in fact, being an imposter.

My 12-month crisis has led me full circle and left me in a more happy, confident position to take 2026 by the balls and lean into who I’ve always been. And into the position I’d like to own in my business. Maybe I am one for resolutions?

Welcome to The Red Thread

So if you’ve read this far, I’d like you to formally introduce you to The Red Thread. This Substack, in addition to being a simple outlet for my creativity (and hopefully a source to embolden yours), will be an exploration of what brands should take away from, borrow and steal from luxury brands in order to build the same kind of timeless, relevant, culturally aware, and irreplaceable positioning in their own categories.

On top of that, these weekly(ish) newsletters will include a healthy dose of what’s happening culturally, what’s inspiring me lately, and what’s on my radar.

I hope you’ll join in for the ride.