Earlier this month, I introduced the UK premier of Jane Schoenbrun latest film ‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’ as part of MUBI’s Sonic Weekenders festival.

I was invited to speak about the way that Schoenbrun uses music in their films, which gave me an excuse to spend the first week of August listening to the ‘I Saw The TV Glow’ soundtrack on repeat. The title of this Substack actually comes from a song that Caroline Polachek wrote for that film film, ‘Starburned and Unkissed.'

Below is an edited version of the introduction I gave.

We all have a piece of media that we discovered quietly in adolescence that felt like a portal into another universe, a better one.

Jane Schoenbrun’s films explore the deeply formative nature of pop culture, how it shapes our tastes, identity and desires. But their characters aren’t just obsessed with pop culture. They’re consumed by it.

In their eerie internet era debut, We’re All Going To The World’s Fair, teenage protagonist Casey confesses, “I know how it’s going to end now. I’m going inside the video, through the computer, into the screen.”

Each of Schoenbrun’s films explores the delicious danger of both losing and finding yourself in fantasy worlds. The allure of this glowing fantasy is articulated through music – sullen ambient soundscapes act like siren songs, or creepypastas you can’t quite look away from. They pull characters into shadow worlds that force them to confront parts of themselves they’ve tried to bury deep down.

Alex G’s scores creep in like the sound of reality cracking open to reveal the raw, beating heart of fantasy, desire and self-discovery. His music soundtracks the fictional worlds these characters are drawn into, like the theme song of TV show The Pink Opaque in I Saw The TV Glow, that Owen is hypnotised by, lying on the sofa in their parents’ basement. Glowing, spacious synths blur the line between fantasy and memory, sounding full of both wonder and terror.

In I Saw The TV Glow, the music feels like messages filtering through from another world, like a TV show leaking through the cracks in the suburban pavement. The soundtrack is created by contemporary era-defining queer artists like Phoebe Bridgers and Snail Mail, yet it feels like remembering songs from your teenage years that may or may not have really existed.

For Owen, these songs are a way to access their buried self. Music kicks in most memorably at decisive turning points, like the scene at The Double Lunch dive bar where Sloppy Jane, Phoebe Bridgers and King Woman exorcise their suburban ennui onstage while Maddy tells Owen the truth about The Pink Opaque.

Music reveals just how flimsy our grasp on reality is, how easy it is to float away in your imagination while alone in your room. In Shoenbrun’s films, songs often cut off abruptly, jolting us back to an unfulfilling reality where buzzing cicadas or the click of a computer mouse are the only sounds to break the aching silence.

Even when the music stops, the sound, or lack of it, always feels intentional. In World’s Fair, it underscores Casey’s isolation while in TV Glow it highlights the mundanity of suburbia through humming vending machines or TV static. And any horror fan knows that silence can be the most terrifying sound of all.

TeIn Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Schoenbrun toys with well-trodden horror tropes – masked killers, teenage house parties, sex and gore – but sonically, they sidestep the expected.

We expect violence to be accompanied by a soundtrack that embodies escalating tension, a sense of dread or a warning that something terrible is about to happen — not Counting Crows’ bittersweet piano ballad, Long December. The music often creates an almost dreamlike distance, suggesting that sometimes horror can open the doorway to something sublime.

Screams and spurting blood are muted by this unlikely soundtrack, but the kind of disassociation that helps you get out of your own head isn’t presented as a bad thing. After all, violent slasher movies can be comfort films. What seems scary at first can become pleasurable and liberating. But that’s something Schoenbrun has been exploring across all of their work.

Across their filmography, pop culture is entwined with queer liberation. Their films explore how young queer people often encounter their identity through culture before expressing it themselves. Films and TV shows offer glimpses of other ways of existing. For the characters in Schoenbrun’s films, fiction can become a vehicle for sexual desire, fantasy and self-discovery.

The pop culture that Schoenbrun’s characters obsess over isn’t “good” in the conventional sense. Just like critically panned films and music have become cult queer, classics, Schoenbrun’s cast of outsiders aren’t concerned with pre-ordained rules about “good taste.”

When Owen rewatches The Pink Opaque, they realise it’s not how they remembered it. In Camp Miasma, Kris says that the original film franchise is transphobic and misogynistic, but she can’t help but feel drawn to it anyway. Our fantasies and desires aren’t always straightforward and this jarring juxtaposition is reflected in the Camp Miasma soundtrack which creates unlikely opposition between visuals and sound.

It also serves as a reminder that what is happening may or may not be real. Are we in a fantasy, a film, or a film within a film? Did this really happen? Is it really happening?

These are works that leave indelible marks like glowing pink tattoos etched into our skin forever.

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“I want a legacy!”

It was one of those hazy London nights where beer blurred the sharp edges of skyscrapers, along with all our neurotic fears. We were falling out of the bar and into the taxi when you blurted out those words.

It was refreshing to hear someone else say it out loud. I was embarrassed and ashamed of all my desires.

What does it mean to want a legacy? It’s a word loaded with egotistical, selfish connotations. It’s for the fame hungry, the self-obsessed, the men wanting an heir, not a child. But I don’t think wanting a legacy is necessarily about success – and I don’t believe it’s always selfish either.

Legacy seeking can mean living a life that is intrinsically meaningful to you, but in the age of content creation, it’s hard to know where personal meaning ends and personal branding begins. How are you supposed to carve out your own legacy beyond all the noise? How do you know why you want the things you want?

Lately, my mornings have been existential and blue. I turned 29. I said I’d write a novel before 30. I notice I’m still not doing it. Yet when I think about why I want to write a novel, when I really get down to the knots and weeds of it, my vision grows muddy. It’s impossible to separate the freedom and joy that writing fiction has given me from the fantasy of leaving behind a legacy. It’s too much pressure, so I do nothing. It sucks out the joy from writing, leaving it limp and lifeless.

In the back of the taxi, on that beer blurred London night, we belted out the lyrics to our favourite Keaton Henson song, The Pugilist. “Don’t forget me don’t forget me don’t forget me don’t forget me don’t forget me,” he pleads desperately, voice shaking.

I want a legacy. Don’t forget me.

I chewed those sentences over in my mouth until they began to sour.

Even though I was the one who started the conversation about legacy because a therapist had recently told me that I was preoccupied with my own. It wasn’t necessarily that I wanted to be famous (too shy) or immortal (too exhausting), but I expected my life to be a certain way, to unfold like the satisfying, linear plot of a novel. I wanted to have a story to tell. A Wikipedia page full of adventure, art, love, drama. All this self-mythologising, she said, was leading to disappointment which was leading to depression.

If I do care about my legacy, I’m not alone. In Belle and Sebastian’s If She Wants Me, Stuart Murdoch chirps, “If I could do just one near perfect thing I’d be happy / They’d write it on my grave or when they scatter my ashes.” In Godard’s Breathless, a priggish film director says his life goal is, “To become immortal…then die.” On his deathbed, Robert Mapplethorpe told his once-partner Patti Smith, “We never had any children.” She responded, “Our work is our children.”

I’ve carried that quote around in my chest since I read it. It was the first time I had seen creativity elevated to the same worthiness as children. That, as a woman, my legacy might be more than motherhood.

Legacy is often cited as a reason for having children. The public consensus is that this is not a good reason because it is selfish, but it is a popular one nonetheless, even if people don’t always admit it. And is it really so selfish to want to leave something behind when you’re gone?

If you don’t have children, where does that leave your legacy? Historically, women have been shut out from the kind of creative legacy afforded to men. Children have been the only way for women to leave something behind and, even then, that legacy bears their husband’s name. Even the novels they wrote were published anonymously or under a male pseudonym.

Women who choose to focus on art and career over children are perceived as bad mothers. As a woman, wanting to leave a legacy outside of the domestic sphere feels radical.

That’s why I love hearing about older women who lived abroad, who spoke their mind, who had great taste in books and films, who spoke multiple languages, who had multiple love (and sex) affairs, who never put up with shit from men. I think perhaps I want a legacy like that.

So, when I talk about legacy, I don’t necessarily mean the kind where people cover my grave with lipstick stains in Père Lachaise (although, of course, part of me still thinks that would be pretty neat.) It’s the way people I love will talk about me when I’m no longer here. The stories I’ll leave behind about the life I actually lived, not just the one I wrote about. Leaving an impression, even if it doesn’t last forever. Because memory is life. And sometimes the three most romantic words you can hear are, “I remember everything.” Sometimes, a smaller legacy is enough.

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The Pursuit of Legacy May Be Burning Us Out in Psychology Today

In a warehouse in London, I was rewatching Leos Carax’s Boy Meets Girl and ruminating on everything I could have been until now. The film is set during a sweltering spring heatwave in Paris and it’s full of characters reflecting on all the things they thought they’d be.

“I wanted to be someone outstanding,” Alex confesses to a disinterested girl at a party. “Flyer, traveller, musician. Can’t I be reborn?” The 22-year-old is obsessed with first times, a fixation that only exacerbates the sense of regret and despair that permeates every room he steps into. The older you get, the less first times there are to be had.

Unless, that is, you change everything in your life. Moving abroad can be a kind of rebirth.

For a long time, moving to Paris felt like something I would always talk about, but never actually do. I didn’t want to be that person at the party who always talked in could have’s and would have’s. I didn’t want to keep wishing to be reborn.

But, no matter how determined or delusional you are, there will always be some circumstances that are entirely out of your control. The 21-year-old au pair who decided to move to Paris straight after finishing her masters couldn’t have predicted how Brexit would turn out, or that we would plunge into a global pandemic in seven months’ time.

It didn’t help that every time I researched moving to Paris online, I was bombarded with stories about how hard it is. My TikTok FYP showed me videos of girls crying because they didn’t have any friends. Reddit threads were crowded with mansplainers saying that it wasn’t even worth trying because the bureaucracy would kill you. Facebook groups were full of apartment scams which desperate internationals fell for because they didn’t have a substantial enough rental dossier to go down the conventional route.

But, last year, after six years of planning, everything finally fell into place. My route to Paris was made easier by an Irish passport and a lot of luck with my apartment, but there are plenty of things I have learnt since that I wish someone had told me before I moved. Below I’m going to explain how I moved abroad at 28 (the admin, the job search, the language, the friendships, the apartment) and how you can do it too.

My story

In 2019, I spent the summer in France. I worked as an au pair in Nantes before coming to Paris for a few days to celebrate my 22nd birthday. I was still a student so I stayed in the cheapest Airbnb I could find. Somewhere between the disastrous au pair experience and commuting from Montreuil to Paris each day, I decided I wanted to move.

It took seven years to make it happen. I lived in London, Kent and Brighton. I worked various fashion and media jobs — many at publications that no longer exist. I built a freelance career. I learnt French online. By the time my Irish passport arrived, I knew I had to make the leap.

So I did. In January, I packed as many of my clothes as possible into a big suitcase, heaved it onto the Eurostar and arrived in an 18m² studio in Montmartre on a freezing, snowy night.

In my first month, I got a job teaching English to adults part-time, (freelance journalism alone doesn’t pay the bills!) registered as an auto-entrepreneur, met my now-partner and signed up for government subsidised French classes at the mairie.

But it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. It has been particularly challenging going freelance as a writer during an unemployment crisis when companies are replacing copywriters with AI. I thought I’d have more financial stability by now. It doesn’t help that I’ve had to spend several hundred euros on medical appointments because it takes a year for your health insurance card to arrive. The admin is truly never-ending and hardly anything is digitised so you have to send a lot of paperwork by post.

Sometimes I wish I’d moved in my early 20s instead like I had originally planned. Back then, every decision felt like it could be an experiment or a phase. Now, it’s my real life and every risk has to be more measured. But moving at 28 has benefitted me too. I’m more confident and resilient. I can handle difficult situations much better than I could at 21. And that has allowed me to envisage staying in Paris long term, rather than treating it like a gap year.

This is where the guide gets more practical, covering jobs, finances, apartments, administration, learning French and making friends.

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It was a cold, sunny afternoon and the whole city looked yellow as though someone had spread butter over it. Sitting on a terrace in Montmartre, I wondered what the hell I was doing with my life. (A likely thing for your under-employed friend to do on a random Thursday at 3pm.)

I thought of my friends back in the UK. Some of them have jobs in law and finance. Some of them have mortgages, investments, pensions. And what was I doing? I’d flung myself across the Channel for some vague notion of a dream. Quit my full-time job at a magazine to flail in French and work part-time as a teacher. Was it time to call it quits on my year of delusion?

Six months ago, I quit my job and moved to Paris.

There was no particular reason behind the move. No job or partner already waiting on the other side. Just a head full of delusion and a quiet wish to change everything in my life. The desire to move was like an itch I couldn’t ignore. After years spent dreaming, it was time to take action.

That action looked like arriving in Paris beneath a surreal flurry of snow that covered the dome of the Sacré-Cœur like icing sugar. I watched lovers etch hearts and initials in the snow that would melt away two days later. Nothing is forever, but I still felt sorry and so guilty for letting all this beauty slip through my frozen fingers. It’s hard to imagine that kind of cold now. Lately, there’s been no ice, only fires. My life here is unfurling at similar extremes.

An essay I wrote in those first snow-spattered days would become my first viral Substack post, laying out my delusional goals for thousands to see. That bloody, vulnerable knot of want laid bare to so many strangers. By March, I felt like a fraud. Every time someone commented saying they felt inspired to be delusional — or worse, quit their job — I wanted to reach out and say, “No, no, no, please don’t follow my example, I’m literally just a random girl on the internet! I’m as lost and confused as you are!”

I’ve weathered more periods of self-doubt since, but I never once regretted moving to Paris. Even when I’m burnt out or sick or roasting alive in my apartment, I still can’t ignore how happy I feel. An American girl in a bar tells me how the magic never wears off. After eight years in the city, it still takes her breath away. We’re all looking for a love like that and I think I’ve found it here.

Now it’s July and clarity is finally emerging from behind the thick clouds of uncertainty. So, here are three things I’ve learnt from six months of living delusionally.

i. the secret to delusion is patience

Building a life you truly love takes time, but patience is a virtue we’re rarely taught to embrace. Capitalism promotes the mindset of everything now and more. We want it to be fast, frictionless, convenient, immediate. This desire for short cuts is manifesting in the rise of AI, but cultivating it in your own worldview can make you sick. Your dreams are not fast food to wolf down in one guilty gulp. They’re a long meal at a restaurant where the service might be slow and the seats might be uncomfortable but, when the food finally arrives, it tastes so exquisite that you forget how impatient you felt half an hour ago.

Social media always shows us the end result, broadcasting clickbaity headlines of 30 under 30 and motivational influencers competing to say how quickly they took their creative practice full-time. But I have always liked taking the long way home, stopping to photograph the sky on the way.

Yet, patience does not come naturally to me. When I moved, I wanted the French fluency, the dream commission and the financial security all at once. When I rang my long suffering mother to express this, she laughed in response and said, “What are you like? You’ve only been there a few weeks. Stop putting so much pressure on yourself.” Fair enough. Sometimes you have to admit when your parents are right.

Six months in, I’ve started making a bit more money, I’ve landed some of those dream commissions and I’m ready to start a C1 French course in autumn. If I’d given up four months ago out of frustration or impatience then none of this would have happened.

“I’m taking it for granted that this – right now, writing outside a cafe in Montmartre, the late March sun on my face – is the dream,” I wrote in my journal on the butter yellow terrace in March. “Sometimes I feel stupid for coming here and thinking it would work. Others, I know I just have to be patient.”

ii. you have taken a risk so don’t be surprised when it feels that way

Taking a risk is a lesson in self-trust. You have to trust that it will work out. You have to trust that if it doesn’t then you will be ok anyway. You have to catch yourself when you fall. Lately, I haven’t been falling as much as hurtling forwards at an unforgiving speed. Spring bled into summer and I worked and wrote and burnt beneath the sun. Now, it’s July and I have whiplash from everything that has happened.

Moving abroad really hammers home the realisation that no one is coming to save you. Changing my life so drastically at 28 made me realise that, really, I could do anything I wanted to do, but I would also have to live with the consequences. The day before I moved, my dad told me I was taking a risk. I shrugged off the comment, only realising later — as I scrambled for money and muddled through French paperwork — the weight of the risk I had taken.

My plan was to spend one year being delusional then the next two years being realistic, but I’ve realised there is no realistic life waiting for me at the end. There’s no boring, well paid job just waiting to hire me. Despite promising myself I’d try freelancing for a year, I’ve applied for many full-time jobs in Paris and had a few interviews. The realisation that the backup option might not exist was terrifying at first, but sometimes it feels liberating. If I’d got the first job I applied for then I wouldn’t have got the opportunities that I’ve had since.

I believe it’s our right to take all the risks we want. I hope I never stop taking risks. I hope the thrill of the fear never goes away. I want to keep on feeling its frisson forever. It makes me feel daringly alive.

iii. moving cities will not make you less busy or more prolific

Like many other hapless dreamers, I hauled my body to Paris to write, naively thinking that the city would reward me with time, space and inspiration. I imagined long afternoons writing in cafes, early mornings scribbling in my journals, slow weekends where words would flow like water. Surely leaving the chaos of London would reset my calendar. But I only ended up recreating the same breathless, frantic pace on the continent.

Obviously, moving countries is time-consuming. It presents you with mountains of the kind of dull paperwork that is antithethical to carving out time for creating. Then there are the financial implications of starting all over again. I’ve been working two jobs which sometimes means working every hour I’m awake on weekdays. I’ve been battling my chronic illness and navigating endless appointments in French. I’m in a new relationship and I have new friends. None of this is particular conducive to free time for personal projects.

Lots of people move to Paris to write and realise that the city is not set up for that anymore. When writers moved here in the early 20th century, it was cheap. You could live off writing and maybe the odd side job. It’s much harder to do that now unless you have additional financial support from family.

Facing the glittering turquoise sea in Brittany, my boyfriend recently asked if I’d been feeling inspired lately. Truthfully, I hadn’t. I hadn’t had time for inspiration. The guilt of not making the most of this beauty reared its head again.

So, is a year of living delusionally worth it? I think so, but I’d only advise it if you’re pursuing something you think about every single day. You have to want it to badly you can’t imagine living without it, otherwise the patience, the risk and the burnout isn’t worth it.

Still, in Paris, the magic never goes away. I still rest my arms against the cold stone balustrade of the Sacré-Cœur and feel the weight of all the hopeful dreamers bartering their delusions on the sweltering streets below. I hope I’ll have time to write about it all in more detail one day. The delusional part of me still thinks I will.

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The morning smells like cut grass and sun cream. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but somehow you’re transported back to the last day of school, six weeks of sunny possibility stretching ahead. It feels like days spent lying on hot trampolines, fingers grazing fresh daisies, hands sticky from melting ice lollies.

As you walk to work, your heart swells with excitement for a six-week holiday that will never come, a yearning feeling that tugs you back into a vague jumble of childhood memories. You are both happy and sad. You know you can never go back.

Nostalgia usually strikes us out of the blue (a song playing in the pub, or a stranger on the bus wearing an ex’s perfume) but sometimes we seek it out — by rewatching films we loved as tweens, revisiting old photographs, reading old journals.

These wistful feelings of longing don’t just visit us on quiet summer mornings. They are also responsible for a thriving cultural industry behind the endless Disney sequels, Y2K fashion revivals and band reunions. You can’t go back to the last primary school summer, but you can rewatch the film you saw at the cinema that year.

Ever since the early 2010s and the heady days of the Buzzfeed listicle, nostalgia has been leveraged across the internet as an easy way to provoke strong reactions. Yet this complex emotion often gets a bad rap. When 2026 started with the 2016 social media trend, it supposedly reflected everything wrong with society — the decline of newness, the over-saturation of nostalgia and a modern world so shit that we feel the need to live perennially in the past (even if 2016 was also the year of Brexit and Trump.)

@sophielouwilsonThe best of times, the worst of times 🖤 2016 in gig tickets, photobooth pics from Berlin, fruit stickers, train tickets and a Bowie-themed pub quiz from the week he died (we came second and won a pint) ⚡️ #2016 #journaling #nostalgiacore #2016trend #creativeprocess

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Anyone who is particularly nostalgic is accused of being stuck in the past or resistant to change, but nostalgia doesn’t have to feel bad. Staring out the window on a train thinking about everything that has ever happened is one of life’s richest pleasures. You can’t repeat the past, but you can channel nostalgia to create a better present. Here’s how.

Why do we feel nostalgia?

Nostalgia is a powerful mixture of emotions engaging multiple parts of the brain. Psychologist Clay Routledge describes it as “an emotional cocktail” (yum!) Routledge is the author of a book called Past Forward: How Nostalgia Can Help You Live a More Meaningful Life so I spoke to him over video call to validate my own nostalgic disposition. “It implicates areas of the brain beyond what you would think of as a normal emotional experience, engaging self-consciousness and self-awareness,” he continues.

Seeking comfort in the past

If you’re worried about how often you experience nostalgia right now, you probably won’t feel this way forever — at least not until you’re much older. Young adulthood tends to be a period of greater nostalgia than middle age, when you’re far enough away from childhood to romanticise it, but still close enough that it doesn’t feel so long ago.

Young adulthood and old age are “more likely to be times of upheaval and transition,” says Routledge. “When you are young, you go away to university, start a new relationship, figure out what to do with your life, move to a new city. There’s a lot of upheaval.” Uncertain times breed nostalgia, which might explain the proliferation of the 2016 trend, or why so many people have been rewatching Twilight.

The good news is that very few people are too nostalgic. “People tend to use nostalgia fairly appropriately,” explains Routledge. “It’s a way for them to reconnect with their past and remind themselves what’s important, who loves them, what they value in life.”

Making sense of our lives

Nostalgia might strike us unexpectedly, but that doesn’t mean we can’t use it intentionally. By paying attention to which memories we return to, we can identify what really matters to us. Interestingly, nostalgic people are often less focused on outward markers of success. “Memories are more focused on intrinsic values like contentment and meaning,” says Routledge, “as opposed to extrinsic values like fame, wealth or beauty.”

When people feel nostalgic for their youth, for example, they’re more likely to yearn for its sense of freedom and possibility than for looking younger. Unfortunately, no amount of botox is going to bring back the possibility of being 13-years-old and knowing you still have time to be a teenage prodigy.

Adolescence is often a powerful source of nostalgia, even if it wasn’t a particularly happy time. It’s very common to feel nostalgic for objectively difficult life periods. These memories can be painful, but we tend to reflect more on experiences that shaped us, and negative experiences often do.

Learning from the past to understand the future

Chronic nostalgics aren’t just sitting alone replaying memories of their ex (well, not always.) They’re learning from experience. Nostalgia reminds us that we’re worthy of love and friendship which, in turn, can motivate us to form new relationships.

“When people are lonely, they often look to the past for people they miss and relationships they had,” says Routledge. “That should be sad, right? But it can help you build confidence to go out and create new relationships. You can use nostalgia intentionally in a way that doesn’t keep you stuck, but pushes you forward.”

We need to understand the past in order to predict the future and make sense of the present. Nostalgia doesn’t always keep us stuck in the past. It can push us forwards, too — towards new experiences, new connections, new creative projects.

Innovation is often framed as future-focused, but many creative people draw deeply from the past. “If you talk to a musician, artist or filmmaker, they can spend hours telling you about the films they watched as a child or the music they listened to, and how that inspires them,” says Routledge.

Savouring the moment

A few years ago, I was walking around Peckham in the rain with Joanie, putting up posters for our zine event. I was complaining that I was cold and my feet were wet and Joanie said, “One day you’ll romanticise this.” And here I am. Doing just that. There have been moments during my first months in Paris that have been harder than I thought they’d be, but every time, I remind myself that I’ll romanticise this one day, too.

A powerful bout of nostalgia can pull you out of the moment, but romanticising the past is a way to romanticise the present. If you aim to create experiences you’ll one day feel nostalgic for, those moments become more meaningful. What a privilege it is to have lived a life worth feeling nostalgic for!

Routledge calls this “savouring.” When you savour an experience, it makes you “more mindful and focused on appreciating what you’re creating,” he says. “It’s more likely that you’ll be nostalgic for it in the future because you’re more aware of it.”

One day soon, you’ll be nostalgic for this time in your life too. The good times and the bad times. Every mundane moments becomes a memory tucked away somewhere. So savour it. Make it special. Romanticise even the ordinary parts of your routine. Because one day, a song will come on shuffle or you’ll smell a fireplace in a pub corner, and you’ll yearn to relive those ordinary moments all over again.

This piece was reworked from an article I wrote for Woo, the now-defunct media platform I worked at in 2022/23.

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When Topshop’s first runway show arrived at London Fashion Week in 2006, fashion critic Susannah Frankel wrote that the high street brand, “used to be so uncool, a byword for naff. Now it has become a catwalk star and is taking on New York.”

In the following years, collaborations with Kate Moss and emerging designers fresh out of CSM elevated its status as a serious fashion player. Through its associations with high fashion, Topshop became the jewel in the high street’s crown, offering affordable, directional styles to teens and young adults who flocked there each weekend when IRL shopping was still worth reserving your Saturdays for.

Since then, collaborations between high street and high fashion brands have become commonplace. When Stella McCartney paired up with H&M this year, people were disappointed, but hardly surprised. Zara’s collab with John Galliano raised a few more eyebrows, but it wasn’t particularly shocking either. Kendall Jenner wore Gap Studio by Zac Posen to the Met Gala. Celebrities attended the opening of Primark’s New York store like it was Paris Fashion Week. Even Shein has their own live-streamed runway show.

In short, the high street has never felt more high fashion.

Fast fashion brands are rushing to recreate the glitz and glamour of the luxury sphere with the hopes that some of its prestige will rub off on them, making their products more desirable to consumers who keep up with fashion weeks via TikTok and Instagram. These platforms have given us more access to the luxury fashion world than ever before. Live streams, BTS and influencer-filled guest lists mean that, now, everyone is invited to have a seat on the FROW.

“Fast fashion realised that luxury fashion is being increasingly exposed to a younger audience,” sustainable fashion expert says. “We see TikTokers at fashion week now and that means their audience is watching runway shows.”

The mid-2000s, when nascent high fashion collaborations from Topshop, H&M and Target were born, was a similar era of increased visibility for luxury fashion. Style.com launched in 2000 and a wave of style blogs followed, allowing access to fashion week for those outside the industry as had never been seen before.

This initial explosion of online fashion discourse in the 00s, which is only heightened today, has evidenced the value in being part of the conversation. Quietly dropping new collections online and in-store doesn’t cut it anymore. An influencer-filled runway show creates much more buzz.

High street brands have watched fashion week become the subject of extensive social media discourse, and they want in. “Many mid-market brands have realised the importance of becoming part of the large and growing social conversations around fashion weeks,” trend forecaster Tiffany Hill says. “They’re keen to reach their audiences in new ways and engaging with influencer audiences is a way to increase sales and engagement.”

When high fashion brands go viral and reach beyond social media fashion communities, it’s often because a gimmicky runway or front row moment has been turned into a meme. When fast fashion brands go viral, however, it’s usually due to a new revelation regarding the poor treatment of their garment workers. High street brands are increasingly aware of the stigmas associated with their products and practice. They are equally aware of the opportunity to distract consumers from these issues by deploying familiar high fashion marketing strategies, such as glossy campaigns starring supermodels.

“I think the easiest way to greenwash is by not saying anything at all and making your product look amazing,” Brett says, noting a recent campaign from one of the world’s largest high-street retailers “styled by one of the top stylists using all the world’s best supermodels. When you see it, you completely forget what the materials are. You forget where it’s made or how much it is. You just think it looks absolutely amazing.”

The prices are also reflecting this shift towards high fashion on the high street. A leather jacket from Galliano’s Zara collection could set you back £393 while the cost of a sheepskin coat from Zara’s main line soars all the way up to £699. High street brands aren’t only collaborating with high fashion brands, they’re creeping up to their price points too.

This might seem like an odd move in the midst of a cost of living crisis, but Tiffany notes that “nearly a third of consumers are spending the same amount on luxury as on non-essentials.” For those who can afford to invest, the draw of luxury is bigger than ever, as trends like ‘quiet luxury’ attest. “It’s predicted that around 30% of buyers will increase their spending on luxury items and Gen Z are outspending Gen X because they view luxury as currency,” Tiffany adds.

The high street’s attempts at imitating high fashion can be a form of greenwashing, but ultimately, investment pieces will always be slightly more sustainable, even if the materials they’re made from and the conditions in which they’re made aren’t always that different from the cheaper versions. “If you’re willing to part with a lot of money, you’re more likely to keep it and you’re more likely to resell it,” says Brett. “It’s more likely to stay in circularity longer.” There’s a rampant resale appetite for any H&M designer collaboration, for instance, so pieces are unlikely to get thrown away after only a few wears.

Clearly, there’s a hunger for these collaborations. Those who have the money are willing to invest in pieces from high-street brands that have that high fashion stamp of approval and this setup is mutually beneficial for the brands involved. “Collaborations create something totally unique and impossible to replicate,” brand consultant Elizabeth Stiles says. “They also serve as a great customer acquisition tool to broaden their audience by cross-pollinating each other’s communities.”

However, consumer expert Kate Hardcastle notes how maintaining a luxury image as a high-street brand can be a never-ending task. “You’re only ever as good as your last campaign,” she says. “There is a potential saturation point. The more it is done, the more commonplace it becomes. Unveiling the next Kate, Naomi or Kardashian collaboration can potentially leave consumers thinking this has all been done before.” In a bid to keep ahead of the tide, brands like Zara and H&M have been announcing luxury collaborations at an ever-increasing rate. As well as John Galliano, Zara has collaborated with American designer Willy Chavarria, supermodel Kaia Gerber and photographer Steven Meisel. Meanwhile, H&M collabs read like a who’s who of fashion, featuring Versace, Balmain, Margiela, Karl Lagerfeld, Comme des Garcons and many more.

Ultimately, high fashion collaborations are a smart business move for fast fashion brands and, as such, they’re going nowhere anytime soon. These collabs elevate high street brands and make them seem more desirable while mostly still offering more accessible price points. “This shift reflects an acknowledgment that consumers are seeking more than just products,” Kate adds. “They’re looking for an identity and a narrative that resonates with their personal aspirations.”

As long as marketing and social media trends keep promoting conspicuous consumption and telling us that you can buy your way into a certain lifestyle, high street brands will continue to jump through hoops to appear more aspirational – all while sweeping the stigma of fast fashion under the rug.

This article was originally published in i-D. It has been edited and updated.

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I am nothing if not a dreamer.

The outline of a woman coloured in with uncertain, ambitious potential. The kind of woman who holds a dream between her teeth until it’s bloody and rotting.

But, lately, I’m tired. Tired of all the running and striving. Tired of having nothing to offer but my confused dreams and earnest desire. In the midst of this cold and stormy spring, a quieter ambition is settling into my bones.

Ambition is spiky. It digs into your sides when you try to rest, so that even if you’re physically reading a book on a green chair in a Paris park, you are mentally working out how old the author was when they wrote it. And then you think you should get up from the chair and run home to sit in your tiny apartment and write. The sun, the trees, the moment can all wait. There will be more sunny days, but you — you — will soon shrivel up and die, taking your wasted potential with you. Because who even are you without your ambition?

The problem with working towards your dreams is that it pulls you out of the moment. You tell yourself that if you don’t work everyday, then it will never happen. Then life — your real life, not your dream life — passes you by. I don’t want to waste my life on ambition to find that I missed out on really living.

I chase my dreams to give life meaning, to give a shape to my days, but they’re starting to steal more than they give back. My ambition keeps me up at night, telling me I’ll never amount to anything. But, lately, I feel like responding, so what? Existing is enough.

I’ve been questioning ambition, but I’m not ready to forsake it entirely. It twists its bony fingers round me like a vine and I think I’ll spend years trying to break free from this jungle I built. I’m scared to feel it loosen its grasp even as I fight my way out. I think maybe I want a life like what the internet thinks Paris is like; the green Sénat chairs, the slow afternoons reading in parks, the long coffee breaks on a corner café terrace. We used to want to be great. Now, we just want to be happy.

Only, every time I try, I feel like a fraud. It’s hard to be in the moment when your dreams hum incessantly like swarming bees, ready to attack the minute you take a break from chasing your goals.

In January, I declared 2026 my year of delusion, publishing my own list of delusional goals; moving to Paris, going freelance, writing a novel, getting fluent in French and falling in love. They are all in motion, (apart from the novel which has turned into a short story collection instead) but I got so obsessed with reaching them that I couldn’t enjoy the process. Every achievement is just a box to tick on the way to something bigger and better. I am greedy and impatient. I want everything now. I want to be good at everything the first time I do it.

I write a lot about dreams and ambition. It’s important to keep your dreams alive, but it’s just as important to know when to let them die or evolve or get smaller. To realise that you can’t have it all. To trade an old dream for a new one.

When I watch Parisians in the park who look like they’re in a postcard, I wonder if everyone is really as calm as they look. What are their ambitions? What dreams are they sacrificing on the altar of rest? Is it enough to read in the park on a rare sunny afternoon?

When I was 20, a university careers advisor told me I should be less ambitious. I always thought she said it because she didn’t think I’d get the jobs I was applying for, but maybe she was also warning me that I was setting myself up for a life of disappointment and frustration. A life of never really enjoying resting or reading in the park, one that cuts off the blood supply to these beautiful, calm moments that really give life meaning.

Last weekend, I ran a 10K in Bois de Boulogne. It was my friend’s race ticket, but she couldn’t make it anymore so she gave it to me. I didn’t have time to train so, for the first time in years, I let myself run a race without having a goal time in mind. My only goal was to enjoy it. And I did! The rain held off and everything was bright green and smelled of petrichor. I felt how great it is to have a body that can move, to be living in Paris, to be up and out early on a Sunday morning even though I dreaded it the day before.

Not everything has to be about a goal, a dream or an ambition. Sometimes it’s enough to be grateful that the rain has passed. That an average day is a good day. That you live in a city you love, even if it’s hard sometimes.

“You’ve got it all figured out,” they’ll say when I vocalise my dreams. But I don’t. I never did. All I do is wait and rot beneath the pressure of change and ambition, but when I melt under the spring storm, that spikier, more ambitious version of me washes away. I’m new and I’m nothing. I’m quiet in the rain, taking a deep breath and leaving it up to chance this time.

Welcome to part 4 of my Magazine Girl Dream series. You can read parts 1–3 here. I’ve been receiving a lot of DMs about how to write for magazines in 2026, so I thought I’d put all my advice in one place. There’s a lot, so gird your loins!

Last month, I gave a lecture on pitching and generating ideas for MA Fashion Journalism students at Central Saint Martins and this post pulls from that.

First, a bit about me:

If you’re new here, I’m a freelance fashion and culture writer interested in how trends across fashion, music and culture intersect and what they say about society. I have recently written about the Margiela auction in Paris, when the Coachella aesthetic got so soulless, how the social media ban could impact teen fashion, how AI is changing the tattoo process and why people online think that single women age slower.

In December, I quit my full-time job to go freelance and move to Paris. Since then, I’ve been sending pitches most weeks alongside my part-time job teaching English. I’m also studying French in the evenings, aiming to go from B2 to C1 this year.

How did I get into freelancing?

I started freelancing by accident.

It was 2020 and, like many fresh-faced graduates cast out into the Covid abyss, I couldn’t get a job. I had recently got down to the final two candidates for a position at Vogue, but it fell through. One month later, we went into lockdown and I moved back in with my parents. Not exactly the glamorous start to my journalism career I had imagined as a child!

I had already landed a couple of commissions off pitches sent to Dazed and i-D during my masters at CSM. The plan was to graduate into a staff role, but when we went into lockdown, most businesses went on a hiring freeze. Some, however, were still commissioning freelancers. The work was unstable and fees were low, but I rode out the pandemic at my parents’ house and it wasn’t like I could spend my money at the pub anyway.

Half way through lockdown I got a part-time copywriting job at a luxury fashion brand which helped supplement my journalism income. My list of bylines grew and by the time restrictions started to lift, I had saved enough money to move back to London.

After the fashion brand went under, I moved into a writing role at a start-up digital platform and then a social media role at a music magazine. I enjoyed it, but I missed the thrill of a new commission and having more control over my own time.

Since moving to Paris, I’ve written for Vogue Business, Glamour, Dazed, Bricks, Crack and Behind the Blinds. I also recently gave an online lecture at CSM about pitching. I acknowledged how different the landscape feels now compared to six years ago. The acceptance rate for pitches is lower and it’s less feasible than ever to live off freelance journalism alone.

So, I’m not going to tell you to quit your job. And I’m not going to pretend that everything’s gone perfectly since I plunged back into the freelance world. This isn’t one of those Substack posts telling you how I went freelance and started making six figures. The creative freedom I was striving for has come with a considerable side dish of money worries. That said, I’m still here and still pitching, so here’s everything I’ve learned so far.

Below, we’ll cover generating fresh ideas, developing angles, finding editors, what makes a good pitch, tips from other journalists, plus one pitch that got commissioned and one that didn’t. I hope you find it helpful!

This is where the guide gets more practical, covering where to find ideas and angles as well as how to actually write and structure your pitches. If you’d like to access the rest along with cultural deep dives, short fiction and (coming soon) guides to moving to Paris, you can upgrade for less than the price of a matcha. I’m also offering paid subscribers 1:1 pitching workshops where we’ll look at how to generate ideas, make contacts and break into the industry, as well as jobs you can do alongside journalism to supplement your income or how to balance freelancing with a full-time job.

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When I was 17, my taste for life came back. I was standing in the kitchen at midnight, eating buttered toast for the first time in months. Between bruising my legs against the stage and leaving crumbs on the kitchen floor, I had decided that life was worth indulging in again.

The night comes back in a blur of smoke and glitter. I remember cooling my body in the damp grass afterwards, sweat and dew mixing together on my skin, the sting of stolen spirits, everything tasting, sounding and feeling like the beginning of something.

It was nothing remarkable, really; a gig in an old public toilets-turned-venue, NME’s latest indie flavour of the month, back when it was still a print magazine you could buy in shops. But, until then, I had thought that nothing cool ever happened where I grew up. I didn’t know yet how to experience things in halves. Everything was either the best thing ever or made me want to die. And (most) music was the best thing ever. And soon I would leave this town. And it wouldn’t matter if I wasn’t the smartest or the thinnest. I could have nights like this every night if I wanted to. Something shifted. I started eating butter again and, after that, music taste and actual taste were always connected for me.

Conversations about taste have reached a sickening saturation point. In this week’s episode of Euphoria, Maddy defines it as, “The ability to discern quality and a high aesthetic standard,” adding, “Not everyone has it.” (Sam Levinson certainly doesn’t.) The taste discourse has reached such a deafening pitch that ‘taste’ could replace ‘chic’ in the Phantom Thread tirade;

Taste? Oh, don’t you start using that filthy little word, Taste! Whoever invented that ought to be spanked in public. I don’t... I don’t even know what that word means! What is that word? Fucking taste! They should be hung, drawn, and quartered. Fucking taste.

Despite this supposed fatigue, music taste has been a hot topic over the past few weeks. The absurd discourse around whether Geese are a psyop has led to a widespread questioning of taste and the forces that shape it.

When a digital marketing agency can manufacture networks of social media pages to drive recommendations, how much control do we really have over what we like? What even is music taste? How do you get it? Is your favourite band a psyop? Is it ok to listen to Geese if you’re a girl? And does any of this even matter?

These are all important philosophical questions for our time, so here’s my guide to developing your music taste in 2026. As always, it is not the best way or the only way, it is just a way.

1. You have to have a band you love so much aged 13-16 that you get a bit weird about it

If you didn’t have a band you were so obsessed with as a teenager that it made you a bit ill then I don’t trust your opinions on music. This band will form the bleeding heart of your taste. You will probably grow out of them, and later be a bit embarrassed by it, but no other band, no matter how much you like them, will ever feel the same way again. A first musical love is a lot like a first love. Giddy, intoxicating, a high you might end up chasing forever.

So, as M*rrissey once sang, “Don’t forget the songs that made you cry and the songs that saved your life / When you’re laughing and singing and finally living, hear my voice in your head and think of me kindly.” Yeah, The Smiths were my band at that age.

2. Look beyond the algorithm, but don’t hate the algorithm either

In ‘Fake Fans’, her viral Substack essay exploring the Geese/Chaotic Good discourse, writes that, “Distinguished taste is something people pride themselves on — the idea that they have some resistance left still, that they don’t have to listen to the Alex Warrens of the Sombrs of the world simply because the algorithm has offered its teat to suck.”

A desire to feel in control of your taste is justified, but suggesting that your own music taste is no longer yours just because you discovered it via an algorithm is like suggesting that every couple who ever met on Hinge is not in a real relationship. I am critical of the ways that algorithms can flatten our taste and I certainly don’t think they should be your only avenue for discovering new music, but this technology is part of our lives now, and sometimes it shows you cool stuff.

Anyone freaking out about Geese being a ‘psyop’ just doesn’t trust their own taste. Unless you unplug completely and go and live in a forest, your taste will be influenced by marketing. You have to trust what you like enough to know that something is good no matter how you discovered it. Just because you like a band that ran a successful marketing campaign, doesn’t mean you’re a gullible sheep following everything the internet tells you is cool. Unless you are. In which case, grow up and read on.

3. Take long train journeys with nothing but your headphones and your imagination

Listen to sad songs. Listen to happy songs. Stare out the window and pretend to be in a film. Realise the sentence “life is a journey” is actually so true. Realise you’ve never got over anything ever. Cry. Write some sad poetry about it. Book a return journey. Repeat.

4. Get a crush (but know that your own music taste will always be superior to theirs)

My early crushes helped me discover a lot of new music. At the time, I tended to think their taste was better than mine just because they were men. Since I fixed this internalised misogyny directed at myself, I’ve decided that trusting my own taste as a woman is a political act. And I never liked Radiohead anyway.

5. See as much live music wherever and whenever you can, especially aged 15-21, but forever after that as well

It’s obvious from the start of this piece that live music means a lot to me. I started going to indie gigs when I was 15 and was watching live music several times a week after moving to Sheffield for uni. Concerts are expensive, but most cities have venues that put on gigs by smaller bands for free. Be genre agnostic. Seek out music you’ve never heard of before. And, as much as possible, get there early to catch the support.

6. Go dancing!!!

If you want to discover more music in more random serendipitous situations then the dance floor is the place to do it. You don’t have to Shazam every track, but think of it like foreign language immersion. You will learn just by listening and your taste will grow. The smoking area is just as good as the dance floor for expanding your taste. Chat to cool strangers and they might tell you about the music they’ve been obsessed with lately.

7. Listen to an album a day

When I started working at a music magazine in late 2023, I decided to expand my music taste and knowledge by listening to an album a day. I’ve missed a few days since then, but I stick to it as much as I can. I pull from a range of difference sources, including Marg.mp3 artist interviews, the 1001 albums generator, Pitchfork’s best albums of the 2020s so far, Rolling Stones best albums of all time, new releases every Friday, this list of French albums and Crack Magazine’s best albums of 2025. Some of my favourite albums I’ve discovered this way are linked down below.

8. Talk about new releases

This is how you form opinions on what you have listened to beyond, “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” And opinions are how you form taste. Argue, fangirl, convince someone, have someone else change your mind.

9. READ MAGAZINES

Remember them??!! I’m not saying you have to fork out loads of cash on annual print subscriptions (unless you can afford it) but, at the very least, follow music magazines on social media for regular new artist recommendations. If you want to go deeper, read profiles of your favourite artists to see who they’ve been listening to.

10. Listen with love <3

Life is busy, but try to carve out some time to listen with no distractions. This can look like playing to an album while you drink your morning coffee, or going for a walk with your new favourite song on repeat. I like to soundtrack my Friday runs with a new album that has been released that day, even if it’s not typical ‘running music.’

10. No such thing as ‘guilty pleasures’

Drop Dead by Olivia Rodrigo will absolutely be one of my top songs of 2026 because it is a Class-A Bop. Disliking something just because it’s popular is childish. By all means, be critical of things that are popular, but don’t dismiss them just because of their popularity. There is a lot of great pop music so don’t be too miserable to enjoy it. These days I only have one musical guilty pleasure; M*rrissey.

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You can find more tips for music discovery beyond the algorithm in this post I made for Crack Magazine back in 2024.

I’ve buried this last image at the bottom because it’s so earnest it makes me cringe, but if you’ve read this far, you’re allowed to see it. From the night I wrote about at the start of this post;

Some of my favourite albums and EPs for the past year

• My New Band Believe - My New Band Believe

• Play Me - Kim Gordon

• Shipyard Groan -

• Upper Mezzanine - Sex Week

• Friend - james K

• Once Upon A Time… In Shropshire - Jerskin Fendrix

• Carving The Stone - For Those I Love

• Goodbyehouse - snuggle

• The New Eve Is Rising - The New Eves

• Amateur - Molly Nilsson

My favourite albums I listened to for the first time recently

• Live At The Witch Trials - The Fall (1979)

• Strawberry Switchblade - Strawberry Switchblade (1985)

• Microphones in 2020 - The Microphones (2020)

• All Around - The Oranges Band (2003)

• Rip It Up - Orange Juice (1982)

• The Electricity In Your House Wants To Sing - I Am Robot And Proud (2006)

• The Many Faces of Gale Garnett - Gale Garnett (1965)

• Etiquette - Casiotone For The Painfully Alone (2007)

• New Fluffy Delicious - The Pearly Gatecrashers (1992)

• Ephemera - Fergus Jones, Perko (2024)

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In 1946, Walter Freeman performed his first ice pick lobotomy on a 29-year-old housewife from Washington DC, who was suffering from severe depression. As a major advocate for the procedure, Freeman would soon be performing more than 20 lobotomies in a single day. His youngest patient was just 12-years-old.

One might wonder what Freeman would make of the way we talk about lobotomies today. The cultural perception of this invasive procedure has been flattened, sanitised and aestheticised, becoming more associated with the frail femininity of The Stepford Wives, The Bell Jar or Chloe Cherry’s wide-eyed dissociative pout than with the true horrors of psychiatric abuse that so many were subjected to during the last century.

A lobotomy is a type of brain surgery that became popular in the 1930s which involved severing the connection between the frontal lobe and the other parts of the brain. It was performed on thousands of people with mental health conditions like schizophrenia and depression before falling into disrepute in the late 1950s. It was also performed disproportionately on women.

“Effective lobotomy would lower inhibition,” explains Andrew Scull, sociologist and author of Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness. “People would often become lazy and more passive which could be interpreted by some as an improvement, but it was adding a different kind of mental deficit to their pre-existing illness.”

Online, you will have likely stumbled upon phrases like, “Live laugh lobotomy”, “I got a lobotomy at Claire’s” or “Get in losers, we’re getting a lobotomy.” The hashtag #lobotomy has over 500 million views on TikTok while #lobotomychic has more than 10 million. “I wish it was 1952 so my husband could just take me to get a lobotomy,” reads one viral tweet. “i don’t want to be a girlboss anymore, i want to take pictures of the cows while my husband drives me to my lobotomy,” reads another popular post. TikTokers show off their lobotomy tattoos featuring medical tools or graphic images of ice picks going behind the eye or up the nose and into the brain. Lobotomies have slipped into cultural parlance, reflecting the rise of ironic, nihilistic feminism that has helped propel the trend alongside the rise of bimbo and coquette aesthetics.

A key element of the obsession is its aesthetic . The dead-eyed ‘lobotomy chic’ look, in which the subject puts on a blank stare and disaffected pout, has become a go-to Insta pose for everyone from Billie Eilish to lobotomy chic posters girls Chloe Cherry and Gabriette. The pose is often accompanied by messy minimal make-up, preppy clothes and ironic Catholic symbolism all captured in close-up selfies or using digital cameras with the flash on. The aesthetic has become shorthand for meta-irony, nihilism and detachment. It’s coded as cool and sexy as long as those embodying it look like they’re too detached to care about being either.

Like heroin chic before it, lobotomy chic turns a numbed emotional state into a disaffected beauty trend, romanticising mental illness through aesthetics. It’s an expression of apathy in the face of an increasingly uncontrollable world. In her viral essay “The Smartest Women I Know Are All Disassociating,” Emmeline Clein argues that performing extreme levels of detachment is a way to cope with modern life and living in a patriarchal society. Lobotomy is shorthand for emotional indifference, which seems like a useful tool to deploy if you often feel in a state of despair.

The lobotomy obsession is part of a wider cultural nostalgia that romanticises psychiatric remedies of the past while ignoring their context and negative side-effects. “The worst thing about depression is knowing that 150 years ago my treatment would have been vibrators and heroin,” reads one widely circulated tweet. “If we must suffer through These Trying Times then we need to re-normalise fainting chaises and parasols and convalescing by the seaside,” says another.

“The culmination of recent events like the pandemic, and the current state of politics and the economy have left many individuals feeling like they have had enough,” says Umair Akram, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Lincoln who has researched how memes might serve as a coping mechanism for people experiencing symptoms of mental illness. “With that in mind, the lobotomy would be the ultimate opiate. The obsession lies under the premise of reduced tension, increased apathy and lethargy, an almost sedated feeling which is easy to romanticise and perhaps crave in current times.”

It is estimated that more than two thirds of lobotomies were conducted on women. Scull explains how, “there was a sense that women’s brains didn’t matter as much as men’s. Walter Freeman argued that women could go back to being housewives and a decorative feature around the house. It wasn’t as demanding a job, in his opinion, as men who had to go out into the workforce.” Lobotomies were used to control women who were seen as being ‘too much’ and they were given much less leeway than their male counterparts who might have behaved in the same way. For example, in 1941, JFK’s father Joseph Kennedy Sr arranged a lobotomy for his 23-year-old daughter Rosemary in an effort to “cure” her erratic and rebellious behaviour which he thought could cause embarrassment and scandal for the family. It left Rosemary with the capabilities of a two-year-old, she was permanently incapacitated and unable to walk or speak intelligibly.

It was a time when women were expected to be “calm, cooperative and attentive to domestic affairs” so it’s unsurprising that a surgery that “rendered female patients docile and compliant, but well enough to return to and care for their homes,” became so popular. Queer women, too, were sent for lobotomies to ‘cure’ their sexuality. “I think women who acted out or misbehaved were seen in much more hostile terms than their male equivalents,” Scull continues, “even though men were often more physically threatening.” People of colour were targeted, too: in the late 60s or early 70s, several physicians were awarded a grant from the government to explore doing lobotomies, which they performed on Black prisoners whose politics they did not like. Similarly, Black boys as young as six with “behavioural problems” were given lobotomies in Mississippi by Dr Orlando J. Andy.

The romanticisation of lobotomies focuses largely on how they affected white middle-class women. Online depictions of empty-headed housewives and disaffected pouts ignore how lobotomies were weaponised against LGBTQ+ people and people of colour to violently enact homophobic and racist ideologies.

While joking about lobotomies might seem like a fairly harmless trend, it’s coinciding with a troubling rise of trad wife idealism that glamorises women not being able to make their own decisions. Not having to think for yourself or make your own decisions can sometimes seem liberating in theory, but returning to a time when women couldn’t open bank accounts by themselves or order a drink at the bar without a male companion is not something to idealise, particularly when women in many states in the US are having their reproductive rights taken away thanks to the rollback of Roe v Wade, or when women in Iran are being killed for protesting the country’s morality laws.

As long as the feelings of powerlessness felt by many young women today continue, however, so will the daydreaming about lobotomies or Valium prescriptions or convalescing by the sea with vibrators and heroin, says digital culture expert James Cohen. “This meme isn’t going anywhere,” he concludes, “unless we make positive systemic changes that show young women they have power and agency in their waking, non-lobotomised lives.”

Note: This piece was originally published in Dazed in 2023, but I recently spoke about it on this NPR radio show on ‘the numb girl’ aesthetic with so I am resharing it again below. I hope you enjoy reading!

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When sunlight spills through my windows, I feel rich. In its blinding glare, I could be at Versailles, enveloped in gold, gilded walls with chandeliers that shimmer all summer. Gold is gold, after all. When did we decide that metal was worth more than sunlight?

The early spring weather feels like luxury, but there is no way to bottle up that sunlight and sell it. If there was, they would have done it already and we would be renting that too.

Lately, all I think about is money.

I walk to work at sunrise with rain in my shoes. I feel the future beneath my feet. I hold the damp city morning in my quiet hands. The day is grey and red and yellow. Buildings reach up to the sky, while here on earth, warm-lit bistros try to bring a little heaven to the dreary day.

March was a long, hard month of sickness and administration and diminishing returns. April in Paris starts with showers, not sunlight, but glimmers of hope shine back from the puddles on the pavement. I still have faith that it will work out.

Whenever I feel lost, I return to Just Kids. It reminds me there is never just one way to live; there are back doors, hidden corridors, moulds to break, new people to become, desire paths yet to be trodden. But these things take time.

During her first summer in New York, Patti Smith felt guilty and out of place. “Everyone was struggling,” she writes, “and I, the country mouse, was just an awkward presence.” Today, it feels like everyone is still struggling as much as ever. Those early months in a new city are tough, when you’re no longer a tourist, but still an outsider. I am grateful to have a roof over my head and some, sporadic employment.

When Patti first arrived in New York, she slept rough in Central Park by night and, by day, roamed the city dropping off job applications at shops and bookstores. During this period, she her mantra, “I’m free. I’m free. Although, after several days, my other mantra, I’m hungry, I’m hungry seemed to be at the forefront.”

After eventually finding a job in a bookstore, she was able to rent an apartment with Robert Mapplethorpe where “the walls were smeared with blood and psychotic scribbling, the oven crammed with discarded syringes and the refrigerator overrun with mould.” The rent was $80 a month.

For as long as artists have lived, their poverty and struggle has been glamorised. That poverty and squalor that Patti describes was very real, but I can understand why we may feel inclined to romanticise it in 2026. It plays into the enduring trope of the struggling artist, while also depicting a lifestyle that is no longer possible.

Patti’s first apartment might have been at the more extreme end of the spectrum, but today, in cities like New York, London and Paris, people still live in relatively squalid and uncomfortable conditions, but they have to choke up £1,000 a month for the pleasure. When I left the north London warehouse I lived in for two years, they were renovating the 12-bed flats so they could charge £1,300 a month to rich wannabe artists preoccupied with the aesthetics of a creative life without having to deal with the financially unstable reality. Struggling in a major city is perceived as more meaningful and easy to romanticise than it is anywhere else, but it is a privilege to even be there in the first place.

I’ve started repeating Patti’s “I’m free, I’m free” mantra when I feel stuck or broke or when I’m questioning my decisions, but it is hard to believe it after spending so many afternoons doomscrolling LinkedIn to find that the only jobs for writers involve writing AI prompts. Soon my mantra turns into “I’m scared! I’m scared!”

Pursuing a more creative or delusional path always comes with a side dish of money troubles. And it’s a dish served cold. It’s a cruel paradox that trying to focus more on art inevitably means spending more time worrying about money. I worry about pensions and student debt and whether I should know more about investing. I worry about the crumbling journalism industry and where my next pay check will come from. I worry that even if I decide to apply for higher paying, less creative jobs, they will be impossible to get because the job market is so monumentally dire. I worry about whether I will be able to afford to stay in Paris for more than one year or whether I’ll have to crawl back to my parents’ house on the cusp of 30, feeling like this is my punishment for dreaming too big.1

But it wasn’t always this way. As a child, I naturally imagined that I’d grow up to be filthy rich.

In Poor Artists, Zarina Muhammed writes of this naive childhood belief that a creative path will lead to riches. After falling in love with galleries as a kid, she thought to herself, “If art lives in palaces, I wonder where artists rest their heads at night. I’m so excited to find out!” A few pages later, she writes how her art degree left her with an ever increasing £60,000 of debt. When we are young, our fantasies know no bounds. The artists we see online, on TV and in magazines are all rich and famous, so surely that will happen to us too.

In primary school, we invented lavish playground games that revolved around our three-storey mansions and Hollywood actor husbands. My brother and I would run round furniture department stores pretending we owned everything in there. When I got older, I snuck issues of Vogue into science class where my friends and I would sit at the back, circling the clothes we’d buy when we were grown up and rich and beautiful. I made a pact with my teenage best friend that we would go to Paris together when we were both rich and famous and buy a Chanel 2.55 handbag from the rue Cambon store.

I’m not sure when I stopped believing that a huge pay check was coming my way, but over the years of London rent, late invoices and student debt, my dreams changed. Two years ago, when a friend asked me if I imagined my future self being rich, I realised that a shift had occurred. Of course I didn’t imagine my future self being rich! I was a journalist!

Some people might call this a ‘self-limiting belief’ rather than a financial reality. The internet is full of advice on how to grift and hustle your way into making money from just about anything. All you need to do is post on TikTok 5-times a day or upgrade to a paid Substack subscription to find out how to turn your blog into a six-figure full-time job. The carrot is dangled under your nose everywhere you look, but it smells rotten.

This advice tells us that you’re supposed to think of money as an energy. If only you manifest it, then it will flow towards you. Global financial and unemployment crises be damned! You just need to meditate more! In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron writes that, “When we do what we are really meant to do, money comes to us.” In reality, dedicating yourself to your craft is only a small part of it. You also need a great business brain and to learn how to relentlessly promote yourself on social media. Even then, nothing is guaranteed.

According to Cameron, the belief that selfishly pursuing money is ever morally questionable is just a negative mindset keeping you poor. It’s girl boss capitalism reframed as creative freedom. In reality, believing that billionaires are evil and shouldn’t exist isn’t attracting negative financial energy. We need class solidarity and unionisation, not money manifestation influencers who cosplay as artists.

The title of this essay is a widely circulated quote from the 1981 film, My Dinner With Andre. In it, Wallace Shawn plays a failing playwright who laments, “When I was 10-years-old… I used to think about art and music. Now, I’m 36, and all I think about is money.” Reactions to this clip often express shock that a 36-year-old looked like that in 1981 when they now carry Labubu bag charms, but it also reflects a malaise that feels all the more poignant in 2026 when the day to day cost of living is so high.

The film opens with an insufferable – yet chillingly relatable – monologue narrating a monotonous day in the life of an out of work creative; making phone calls, buying envelopes, photocopying documents, going to the post office, obsessively checking his answering machine to see if any work has come through, and worrying about bills.

A few years ago, someone posted a screen grab of the film’s most famous quote in the r/antiwork sub on Reddit. The comments are heartbreaking, but all too real. “When I was young I dreamed of being a famous author and now I face the same problem. The world has a way of doing that to you,” reads one. A reply reads, “I loved reading books. Now I dream of having the time to read books.”

Another comment comes from a former DJ, now a father in his 40s, who travelled the world and followed his passions throughout his 20s. His life looks very different now, but he still says, “I cannot tell you guys what it means to just be about music and art all the time. If I meet any young person that is into that stuff, I tell them to stay there as long as they can as much as they can.”

I am trying to stay there as long as I can. But how long can you stay there? Patti Smith was 20 when she arrived in New York. In your early 20s, being a broke artist is cute and romantic. By your late 20s, however, it can start to feel a bit tragic – like being a grown man without a bed frame. As you get older, you are expected to be more sensible and take on more responsibilities. You are expected to think about money more, even if you know that it is probably not money that you will think of on your deathbed.

Continuing to think about art and music, even when the rent is due, can be a privilege, yes, but it’s also a form of resistance. Patti was 29 when Horses came out – an age that I thought was impossibly old for a debut album when I first read Just Kids at 15, but is now the age I am turning this summer. Patti had spent the best part of a decade as a struggling artist and poet. Horses brought her critical acclaim, but it didn’t make her rich and famous overnight.

Most days it feels like it costs money just to breathe air. Right now, I am trying to find ways to strive towards a comfortable life while appreciating the moments that make me feel rich without spending, like the sunlight through my window or listening to an album in full every day.

My dreams aren’t smaller just because I no longer fantasise about £10,000 handbags. And that’s not toxic positivity, nor a self-limiting belief. It’s choosing to value sunlight as much as gold, to value art and music as much as money.

Money comes back, but I will never be in my 20s living in Paris again. Like I — rightly or wrongly — romanticise the squalor of Just Kids, I will one day romanticise the struggle of my early months in Paris, too. I will romanticise it next year and the year after and then again when I’m older and I’m too responsible and money-focused to be so reckless with my one wild and precious life.

Ways to feel rich that don’t cost money

1. Feeling the sun on your face

2. Reading in the park

3. Making fresh coffee at home

4. Eating breakfast in bed

5. Putting on your favourite outfit

6. Going to an art gallery for free

7. Listening to your favourite album

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At the Yves Saint Laurent Men’s show in January, Kate Moss caused a blizzard. Flurries of snowflake emojis, ski gifs and jokes about how much it was “snowing” filled up comments sections, accrediting her jittery movements to a pre-drinks spent bumpin’ that.

Kate’s history with cocaine is nothing if not well-documented. The 2005 ‘Cocaine Kate’ tabloid scandal has etched itself into our collective memory. Following a grainy video of her snorting lines at a Babyshambles jam session, Kate was dropped from campaigns with Burberry, Chanel and H&M, while reports circulated that social services were considering taking away her child.

“I felt sick and was quite angry,” she reflected in a radio interview in 2022, “because everybody I knew took drugs. So for them to focus on me, and to try to take my daughter away, I thought was really hypocritical.” Since then, however, Kate has profited off her association with the drug and the party girl image that comes with it. In 2022, as the new creative director of Diet Coke, she joked, “Well, I’ve always loved coke.”

More than 20 years later, our fascination with celebrity substance use hasn’t gone away, but TikTok comments have replaced tabloid headlines. Body language and behaviour is dissected by anyone and everyone. With constant digital surveillance and online commentary, we don’t even need evidence. Any erratic movement is met with a barrage of snowflake emojis that say; this celebrity is on bag.

This emoji is shorthand for cocaine in the digital age – in memes, comments sections and unhinged texts from your plug. Sometimes, these comments are meant to shame the celebrity in question while others lean into the drug’s widespread glamorisation. Comments about snow can also be a way for commenters to signal that they are in the know. They can spot the telltale signs of coke — such as wide pupils, an itchy nose or grinding jaw — and therefore they are edgier than you and get invited to more parties.

The snowflake emoji started as a way to evade online moderators, but it has become a language to speculate, mock, judge or celebrate celebrity drug use. Often these comments are playful and meme-ified, but with figures like Kate, it doesn’t always feel like the internet is laughing with her. It feels like they are laughing at her. Drug use and addiction are still the internet’s last acceptable punchlines.

It’s worth noting, of course, that not everyone who takes cocaine is addicted to it. Portraying anyone who takes it as an addict hellbent on their own destruction only leans further into the drug’s tabloid-ification. A 2005 Vanity Fair article asked, “Was she addicted, or was she just having fun? With Moss it was hard to know, particularly as she never let up on her furiously driven work ethic.”

Before this era of Erewhon juices and Pilates routines, a cocaine scandal was par for the course if you were a celeb, as was the ensuing tabloid takedown. Silent movie actress Alma Rubens struggled with a much-publicised cocaine addiction in the 1920s. Rubens’ addiction was such a source of fascination that The New York Daily News serialised her personal account with the sensationalist headline, Why I Remain a Dope Fiend: The Most Amazing Confession Ever Told! Alma Rubens’ Own Story, Written Personally by the Once Great Movie Star Who Was Ruined by Drugs. Rubens died shortly after its publication, aged 33.

Kate Moss is not the only contemporary A-lister to fall victim to online commenters speculating about her drug use. Jenna Ortega and Emma Chamberlain are among those to receive similar comments recently. Meanwhile, Lana Del Rey — who openly sings about cocaine on her songs Off To The Races, Yayo and Florida Kilos — was one of Tumblr’s many anointed ‘snow queens’ of the 2010s (more on that later.)

Then, of course, there’s Charli xcx.

Like Kate, Charli has profited from her cocaine-adjacent image. In January 2025, a limited-edition Brat vinyl filled with “white powder” was released. After some backlash, it was revealed that Charli’s team were not directly involved with the vinyl — but every negative comment was balanced out with another one calling it iconic.

With Brat, cocaine reached mainstream saturation. In summer 2024, it felt like everyone was bumpin’ that. When the album was unleashed into the world that spring, it didn’t just catapult Charli to a new level of superstardom, it thrust cocaine into the lime(sorry)light again too.

While the drug is perennially smudged on the bathroom surfaces of every London pub and club, Brat increased the discourse around it. Cocaine was no longer something that was just there — at the afters with art school grads or passed around by finance bros at a pub in central. Now, it was something to be dissected and talked about by everyone, whether they had ever tried it or not. Of course, cocaine in music is nothing new. Everyone from Johnny Cash to Yung Lean has released songs about getting high on gear, but Brat was brasher and went more mainstream. As such, talking about coke online became more normalised too.

This mainstreaming ultimately led to a rise in celebrity drug shaming and speculation. Comments about celebrities’ weight or appearance are pervasive, but they are usually met with some backlash. When it comes to substance use, however, people on the internet feel empowered to get a free pass because taking drugs is still framed as a moral failing that deserves punishment and public humiliation, especially if you’re a woman.

As a generation, we are critical of the ‘00s tabloid treatment of celebrity substance use, but we are also perpetuating it in online comments that contribute to a similar collective shaming. TikTok has become the new tabloids, reflecting a prudish culture that increasingly shames sex, drugs and alcohol. And, in 2026, social media judgment holds more cultural sway than tabloids do – just look at what happened to Timothee Chalamet.

So, why do we talk about celebrity drug use online like that? And how has the conversation evolved from the days of unfiltered, hedonistic Facebook party albums to the melancholy aesthetics of Tumblr to the meme-ified snowflake emoji language of TikTok?

We can’t talk about cocaine without talking about its glamorisation. This peaked pre-interenet in the 1970s and there are reams of magazine ads as evidence. Coke was a symbol of glamour and success, especially if you used spoons made from jade or ivory, 14K gold razor blades and luxury drug scales — a bit of an upgrade from rusty house keys.

In 1979, one in ten American adults were using the drug on a regular basis. “With almost everyone using, needing to distinguish oneself from the next person blowing snow became a status move and the paraphernalia market boomed,” said a representative from The World’s Best Ever. These ads were eventually banned, but the glamorisation of cocaine persisted through the decades, hovering through music, cinema and celebrity scandal. The coveted paraphernalia didn’t disappear entirely either (remember the Lana Del Rey coke necklace?)

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When Carolyn Bessette Kennedy was thrust into the spotlight aged 28, she used fashion as an armour to shield her discomfort with this sudden fame. Her unique sense of style was modern but timeless, blending American sportswear with more avant-garde pieces from the likes of Ann Demeulemeester and Yohji Yamamoto.

Carolyn was only in the public eye for five years before the plane crash that took her and husband JFK Jr.’s lives. But from 1994 to 1999, the paparazzi kept a hawk-like eye on the couple and fashion editors reported on her every style move.

Today, — as the recent Disney+ series Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette attests — 25 years on from her death, Carolyn is still a mainstay on 90s minimalist mood boards, with Instagram accounts dedicated to documenting her singular taste and reduced aesthetic.

Fashion editor Sunita Kumar was a uni student living in Manchester when she first glimpsed Carolyn on the cover of a magazine in a petrol station. “She stood out,” the author recalls. “She was standing next to JFK Jr., but she was still standing in her own right. The way she was dressed was so reduced. She seemed very modern. That was it, you know? Then three years later, she was dead.”

Ever since that moment in the petrol station in the north of England, Carolyn had always existed in Sunita’s periphery, influencing her reduced shopping habits and style choices by osmosis. Six years ago, after speaking to friends about how no one had written a book about Carolyn’s longevity as a style icon, Sunita decided to write it herself.

She spoke to those who knew her best as well as creatives from across the fashion industry, including Yohji Yamamoto, Ann Demeulemeester and Edward Enninful. From the book’s outset, Carolyn’s indelible mark on fashion is apparent. From crisp white shirts and tailored beige coats to little black dresses and skirt suits, it reads somewhat like a manual for a timeless capsule wardrobe. Indeed, Sunita hopes that readers will take away the message of sustainability and the importance of investing in one great piece.

I caught up with Sunita on her book, Carolyn’s style legacy, what makes an It Girl and how the quiet luxury vibe shift could encourage more mindful shopping habits.

People are always debating what makes an It Girl. In his introduction to your book, Edward Enninful writes that it’s something that you’re either born with or you’re not. Do you agree? Is this definition still true in the age of influencer culture?
I think what Edward is saying is absolutely right. Why is Carolyn still alive in our memory 20 years on? Why do we think about Jim Morrison? Why do we think about Marilyn Monroe? There are certain people who just remain in our periphery and I think it is because they are genuine people and they know who they are and they just happen to be in the public eye. Carolyn was a bit different because she was a private citizen and she just married a very famous guy. She wasn’t hugely comfortable with that limelight, but she took it on.

Fame-seeking and feeling like you have to tailor your character and be a certain way doesn’t bring happiness. We’re all looking for our legacy or longevity and Carolyn is saying just be yourself. When you are yourself, you shine. That is what Edward is saying. You’ve either got it or you don’t. It is that star quality. We see so many people trying to engineer this persona. I think the younger generation can’t be fooled by that so you really have to back it up. Enjoy your individuality and who you are and I think that the rest follows.

Is there any person or people that you think most embody Carolyn’s style today?
I think the Olsen twins are probably the closest. Carolyn never sought fame and neither do they. They’re very private. They have their own style. They obviously represent The Row which is basically Carolyn’s way of dressing. They’re talented so they’re not seeking fame to validate who they are. They are who they are because of what their skill set is and who they are as women.

Your first encounter with Carolyn was on a magazine cover at a petrol station in Manchester. What was it that made that moment so memorable and what initially drew you to her?
She just stood out. I was a uni student at the time. I think River Phoenix had just died. There were all these beatniks and everyone had this dirty edge about them. So Carolyn stood out. I didn’t know who she was, but the way she was dressed was so reduced. She was wearing a V-neck sweater and a long beige skirt. She was standing next to JFK Jr., but she was still standing in her own right. That was appealing. She seemed very modern. You could tell that she was her own woman. She just happened to be standing next to JFK Jr. That was it, you know? Then three years later, she died.

How did you make the decision to create this book?
I remember the moment when I first saw Carolyn and from then, she was intermittently in my viewfinder. One day, I was speaking to a friend of mine, who was a lecturer at Central Saint Martins and I told her I’d been thinking about doing a book on Carolyn. She said that every year at least one student pins her as some kind of inspiration for their collection. So, I reached out to the wider fashion community and everyone was like, “Oh my god, why hasn’t this happened yet?” She’s still at the forefront of designers’ minds, but there wasn’t a book written about her or her influence and what she means today.

Carolyn passed away 25 years ago. Was there a particular reason why you thought now was the right time to make this book?
There was nothing intentional about it. It just happened to fall in the right place at the right time. When I spoke to photographer Mark Borthwick, he said that the reason why he photographed the way he did in the 90s was because the 80s had happened. I feel like we are in a similar moment of excess, visually and inspirationally. There’s just too much of everything and I feel like it’s time to turn the volume down and really look inwards and ask ourselves if we really need 20 coats from H&M. Maybe it’s about having one really good investment piece. There is an evolution happening and I feel like people are ready for what Carolyn represents.

Do you hope that readers also take away that sustainability message from this book?
Yeah. I wanted to do the book in a way that, if Carolyn were alive today, she would feel comfortable with it. She was a very private person so when I spoke to her friends and family, it was only about fashion. I was not interested in anything else. It was about creating something that fashion students can take home. Or to persuade people to buy just one new piece a year. I hope that there’s a piece of the book for everyone. There’s depth there if you want it, but if you don’t, the book is still really beautiful to look at. It’s taking you somewhere else in your head.

Why do you think you connected with Carolyn, despite your different backgrounds and cultures?
It’s simply the power of fashion. I was always drawn towards slightly masculine dressing. I didn’t like frills or over-accessorising. Carolyn had this masculine edge, but still felt very feminine. My mum and grandmother were very Indian in their dressing, in the sense that they loved wearing really rich colours and everything was matching. My grandmother would always comment if I wasn’t wearing any jewellery. It just didn’t feel very me. Carolyn spoke to me because she showed me that you can dress really simply and exactly the way that you feel is right for you.

Thinking of all of the iconic outfits in the book, are there any that stand out to you as the most defining?
There were so many. There was one that I couldn’t include in the book, but we did a TikTok on it. It was the Yohji coat dress that she wore. The Palais Galliera in Paris had featured it. I feel like that was a major look. There was another Yohji look, a skirt suit with a peplum jacket and skirt, which was pretty defining. Then there were her coats. She wore Ann Demeulemeester and Prada coats. She was very distinctive in what she chose and how she wore it.

What was the most interesting thing you discovered about Carolyn while researching this book?
I think it was really interesting to be in her shoes for a moment and really empathise with her being catapulted from being a private citizen to a public citizen. I think that she was very clever in making sure that she didn’t give away what she didn’t want to and she used fashion to navigate that in-between space. Fashion was the entity between the outside world and the press and her, so she used it as her armour to protect herself. Friends talked about her unpreparedness for that fame and how it reminded them of how Diana was exposed. A lot of friends said that, in the press, there would be commentary on what she wore, but nothing on John, so at that time that was quite a hard thing for her to bear. It was very interesting to find out and empathise with her on a human level, even taking away the fashion bit.

‘CBK: Carolyn Bessette Kennedy A Life in Fashion’ by Sunita Kumar Nair is out now.

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You can find the rest of my articles for i-D from 2019 to 2023 here, including fashion features on Joan Didion, Nora Ephron and Patti Smith. Let me know if you would like more fashion content from me. It’s the niche I started my career in, but I have tended not to share too much fashion content on Substack so far.

“What did you want to be when you grew up?”

We’re walking through Montmartre on an unseasonably warm February day when this question spills out. I’ve been talking about a 30th birthday party I’m invited to in October where the theme is “come as what you wanted to be when you were a child.” So, obviously, I am planning to buy a wig and go as Anna Wintour.

Knowing what you wanted to do when you were very young can sometimes feel like a cage — like you only want to do it now because you wanted it for so long. Oscar Wilde said that your punishment for knowing what you want to be is that “you invariably become it.” On the other hand, if you don’t know what you want, “if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.”

What he left out, however, is that you don’t invariably become what you wanted if that thing no longer exists. To paraphrase our dear friend Carrie Bradshaw once more; After all, seasons change. So do cities. Dreams evolve. Industries shift. Archetypes mutate. Technology kills off the old to make way for the new.

We used to dream of Magazine Girls in Manhattan apartments, living off weekly columns and coffee addictions. Now we dream of Substack famous literary it-girls with bestseller badges and brand partnerships and book deals.

Today, the most successful Magazine Girls are never just Magazine Girls. They are Substack writers and content creators too. They don’t get bogged down by these contradictions. Their adaptability is as important as their talent.

Before, we would only catch glimpses of these elusive writers in occasional documentaries or in the party pages of Vogue. Now they are perennially present on our Instagram, TikTok and Substack feeds. Being successful means being everything everywhere all at once.

Like blogging before it, Substack stepped in to allow everyone to live out their Magazine Girl fantasies. You can start your own weekly column or online magazine. You can romanticise your life by pretending you’re in a ‘00s rom-com even if you’re writing in your notes app on a work break. But the ecosystem today is very different from both the peak of magazine journalism and the heyday of blogging.

In 2021, Ben Smith at The New York Times prophesied that Substack “promises…to make some writers rich and to turn others into the content-creation equivalent of Uber drivers.” The Uberisation of work tempts us with freedom and flexibility, but what it really creates is financial instability and the pressure to produce more work at an increasingly rapid rate.

In the eyes of Substack idealists, this platform is a utopia for magazine writers, freeing them from stingy editors, creative constraints and the time and energy-sucking tasks of sending pitches and chasing invoices. But creative freedom doesn’t pay the bills — which is fine if you’re an OG generationally wealthy Magazine Girl doing all this for a laugh, but not so much for the rest of us.

Yet, professional journalists with years of paid experience keep migrating to Substack because that’s just what you do when you’re a writer now. Recently laid-off writers and editors join the platform, bringing their audience with them. That audience subscribes, likes and comments. Some might even upgrade to a paid subscription, but it is unlikely to give the writer the same financial return or prestige that they received from paid journalism work.

After all, the Magazine Girl has always thrived on the prestige of the magazines she worked for. She wasn’t in it for the money, but for the cultural cachet. Taste is still a form of currency, but where and how you express it has changed.

Today, you can achieve that cultural cachet as a Substack writer/content creator, but the path is more uncertain and less linear. Simply having a Substack does not offer Magazine Girl level of prestige. It has to be cool-girl-coded and successful.

So, did Substack kill the Magazine Girl?

To answer this question we have to sift through the internet sands of time to look at another era when a similar industry panic brewed. When bloggers arrived at fashion week for the first time, many editors responded as though they were staging a coup.

In his 2009 New York Times article, ‘Bloggers Crash Fashion’s Front Row’, Eric Wilson wrote how bloggers “ruffled the feathers of fashion’s elite”, revealing “a tension between old media and new.” They disrupted the “long-held social code among editors, one that prizes position and experience above outward displays of ambition or enjoyment.”

In many ways, editors’ fears came true. Bloggers – and then influencers – did take over fashion week. But they didn’t just gatecrash the establishment. They became it. Bryanboy is editor-in-chief of Perfect Magazine. Susie Lau writes for Pop, Perfect and Business of Fashion. Tavi Gevinson stepped away from fashion to pursue acting, but she still writes for Interview and The Cut on occasion. Bloggers didn’t kill the Magazine Girl. They are Magazine Girls.

Like this symbiotic relationship between bloggers and magazines, we are seeing Substack change established media too. More magazines are prioritising personal essays and niche deep dives after seeing their success on Substack. They are publishing writers with unique voices and personalities that cannot be reproduced by LLMs.

The flip side of this, however, is that journalists are also expected to be content creators, with Substacks, TikToks and personal brands. These journalists extend the prestige of the magazines they work for, rather than the other way around. Influencers review runway shows while journalists post like influencers. Posing as a hot, cool London/New York intellectual can mean more than the work itself because most people only engage with the Instagram copy anyway. This shift can feel alienating for those who got into journalism because they loved writing. (Although, I don’t believe one is nobler than the other — we basically all just want attention. We just express it in different ways.)

Pursuing a magazine career in 2026 sometimes feels like being the last one at the party when everyone else has gone home. But as Charli xcx said, “I am interested in the tension of staying too long.” Besides, there is always a new party starting somewhere else. Substack is far from perfect, but it is also simply the latest chapter in the Magazine Girl story — both a symbol of her demise and proof that, like all legends, she will never really die.

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This is the third part of my Magazine Girl series, and the last one (for now!) Part 1 and part 2 are linked below if you haven’t read them yet. I have lots more to say about this, so I may pick it back up later in the year and I’ll be sharing pitching and freelancing tips in the coming months.

If you enjoyed this piece, read part 1 and 2 here:

When you share a pair of wired headphones, the joined section curves into the shape of half a heart, like the invisible string theory made tangible. This symbol of intimacy is so romanticised that it has survived Airpods and algorithms to remain scattered across Pinterest like rose petals. Those 2017 paparazzi shots of Natalia Dyer and Charlie Heaton holding hands in Paris live in my head rent free.

The act of sharing wired headphones like this requires sitting or standing close together. You have to lean in. You have to pay attention. You have to listen with love.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what love sounds like. Like coffee brewing in the morning or my best friend’s laugh on FaceTime. Like church bells ringing or the sea washing up on shore. Like my favourite song when I was 15 or the album that was playing when I had my first kiss (the 500 Days of Summer soundtrack, in case you were wondering — never not on brand!)

As a child, I used to listen for the ocean in sea shells, or Santa’s sleigh in the sky on Christmas Eve. Then I grew up. I stopped listening for magic. I hear it from time to time in the climax of a perfect song or the clink of a wine glass but, most of the time, in my daily life, I don’t listen with love. I don’t listen at all. I just hear things.

The world is loud and the people in it are worse. There are days when noise could be my 13th reason. Loud chewing in the cinema. Children screaming on the metro. People sneezing, sniffing, snoring.

The walls in my building are so thin that I can hear laptop notifications and TV shows. Sometimes I hear neighbours fucking or arguing. But as my annoyance builds, I remember that I like this about a city — how we’re all loudly existing on top of each other. It makes me feel like I’m part of something.

It is Friday the 13th in Paris – the night before Valentine’s Day – and I have spent the evening listening to the rain. It falls discordantly on the grey metal rooftops, sounding less like rain and more like something is breaking, like the whole building might fall down and get swept away in the deluge. I don’t like the rain, but everyone loves the sound of rainfall, especially when you have a cosy evening in with no plans.

Learning to romanticise the sound of the city is a way to make the noise feel like home. Just as learning to love the sound of rain helps us survive all these dark, damp days and dense, grey nights. I want to apply the same practice to everything else in my life, too. I want to stop just hearing things and listen for magic again.

This past month has been a lesson in listening with love. Until now, I have often passed through life in a dream. My mind has always wandered – taking my hearing with it. I am in the room, but another part of me is hovering somewhere else. It’s anxious self-protection. If I can zoom out and assess the situation while it’s still unfolding, then I can stay one step ahead.

But living in France, speaking another language, I have to go all in. I have to focus or else I lose the thread of the conversation and I might not get it back. Last Thursday, watching Camus’ Les Justes in a small Montparnasse theatre reminded me of learning to love the sound of rain. Both bad weather and learning a language are inconvenient at first, but attention turns them into something beautiful. Listening with love means resisting distraction.

When you have a panic attack, you are supposed to list three things you can hear to shift your attention away from your anxious thoughts and back into your immediate surroundings. Listening grounds you, but it can pull you out of the moment too. Today, it’s so easy to physically be in one place and mentally somewhere else. You don’t even need to use your imagination, just your headphones and a 5G connection.

Against the noise of the world and everyone in it, it’s tempting to cocoon yourself in the comfort of your favourite songs. But in blocking out the bad noises, you’re blocking out the good ones too. You are numbing yourself to the world.1 Because to listen is to be inconvenienced. It requires patience and empathy. You have to step outside of your own head, your selfishness and your daydreams. Listening isn’t always romantic. Sometimes love is tolerating all the noise.

In her Substack essay, ‘Take Out Those Earbuds’, writes, “What if the music that is meant for us is vibrating just beyond the comfortable cushion of noise-cancellation? When is the last time you really listened to birdsong?”

Before moving to Paris, I’d rarely thought about church bells. But when I moved here last spring, Copenhagen-based composer Clarissa Connelly told me during an interview, “Bells symbolise time and they are really, really old. That has always given me perspective.” Months later, Jack from These New Puritans echoed the feeling, saying, “Bells are an incredibly familiar but also alien sound, like the sea or the wind. They open up a whole other world.”

Every morning now, I wake to the bells of Sacré-Cœur and I think about how old they are2, how these sounds have played out for generations across millennia — as a form of time-keeping, a call to prayer, or to celebration. Hearing bells ring out feels much more romantic than checking the time on your phone.

We take ancient sounds – like church bells or birdsong – for granted because they have always been there, but if you listen closely, they can be perspective shifting, creating a grounding, cosmic link between us and the past.

Still, it’s easier not to listen. To let an algorithmically-generated playlist hum in the background. To zone out when cycling through the same conversations on first dates. To take sacred, ancient things like bells and birdsong and music and love for granted because modern technology offers such a rich banquet of choice and distraction. But half of it is rotten. You have to be discerning. And, to be discerning, you have to listen — to yourself and your own desires as much as anyone else’s.

After all, love is a language, but not always an audible one. Listening with love can sound like remembering the small details about a person, or offering a shoulder to cry on. It can sound like boiling the kettle, or helping them with their heavy bags. It can sound like, ‘This song reminded me of you’ or, ‘You’d love it here. It’s so you.’

And other times, it has nothing to do with other people at all. It’s the sound of the rain hitting the roof or the church bells chiming at sunrise. It’s being present. It’s paying attention. I don’t want to listen any other way.

How to listen with love

1. Go for walks without headphones

I spent my first week in Paris walking everywhere without headphones. At first, I felt lost and bored and guilty for feeling that way, but listening to the sounds of the city and the people in it helped me settle in instead of walking around with my own insular soundtrack (even if it is a really good soundtrack.)

2. Learn a new language

This way, you have to pay attention or you have no idea what’s going on. At the theatre, my mind usually wanders, but watching a play in French meant I had to be fully in the room.

3. Listen for old sounds

Church bells, bird song, rain, the ocean. How do you feel when you hear these sounds? Do they stir emotion in you? If not, listen harder.

4. Listen to music in physical formats (if you can)

You used to have to reach out and physically touch music to play it. Tapping a phone or a keyboard doesn’t possess the same intimacy as turning over a record or putting a disc into a CD player.

5. Share songs with people you love

Bring back mix CDs!!! I am begging!!! That’s all. Thank you for reading <3

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Blood on black leather. Moonlight on crushed metal. Sweat. Smoke. Petrol mingling like bad perfume in the September night.

He tried praying to God. He tried thinking pure thoughts. He tried. He tried. He pictured the girl with the bleached blonde hair.

Nick tasted like red wine, the kind we’d been eagerly necking at the bar down the road. I didn’t like red wine much. I preferred vodka and coke, but I wanted him to think I was grown up, so I swallowed it down until my cheeks were flushed and the evening blurred a little around the edges.

He kissed me like he was using his tongue to look for something inside my mouth, but I didn’t mind. Because all this — the wine, the kiss — made the alleyway feel like the centre of the universe. Like we would turn the corner and stumble onto something beautiful like the Trevi Fountain or the Notre Dame, not the dull suburban street my parents lived on.

I remember thinking then that I was falling in love. I decided this was good for two reasons:

1. I had never been in love before.

2. I could invite him to my party next weekend and introduce him to all my friends, proving to myself and everyone else that I was, in fact, not destined to die alone. Quite the opposite. Not only could I attract a man, I could attract an older one who — even with all his life experience — thought I was cool and clever and interesting enough to keep around.

When he slipped his hand up my skirt, it crossed my mind that this would be the first orgasm from someone I actually loved. This was thrilling, despite not being particularly subversive.

I wouldn’t tell him I loved him yet. I wouldn’t be clingy or intense otherwise he would think I was a silly little girl, not a sophisticated woman who drank red wine and let him finger her in alleyways.

As we lay in bed later, my heart pounded and I was scared he would hear it — even though part of me wanted him to. Part of me wanted him to know everything. I wanted someone to know me so completely and still want me anyway. Instead, I got compliments and forehead kisses and waited for those three words that never came. Nick turned his old hand over in mine. He said he wanted to take me to the blue lagoon in Iceland, and I believed him.

“This was nice,” he said, his hand on my waist as we stood in the doorway of my parents’ house saying goodbye. “Let’s do it again soon.” He kissed my forehead. He closed the front door.

That was the last time I saw him.

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Sometimes I can still feel his fingerprints in the small of my back. When I stand on the same spot by the door. Or when I toss and turn in my empty bed and remember what it felt like for him to fuck me.

I lie awake drafting the scathing text I will send him four weeks from now before I block him for good. I will call him an immature piece of shit. I will say no wonder women his own age don’t want him. I will call him a fucking loser.

Once I have worked my way through a colourful index of insults, I think of what I’ll do if he replies. Perhaps work has been really busy, or he lost his phone, or someone died. He will beg for my forgiveness. He will show up at my front door with a bunch of roses from Marks & Spencer. I will pretend to be mad. I will say how dare he treat me like that. I will make him think he’s lost me for good. But I won’t be able to hide my smile. I will be kind and understanding like the perfect girlfriend and then we will joke about it all and make love madly while my parents are out at work.

I had considered cancelling the party altogether. What use was a party amongst all this mess? I had wanted to draw the blinds and refuse to eat and write terrible poetry for my close friends Instagram story. But by the time this morning arrived, the night had an inevitable weight to it. In every universe, there was always going to be a party tonight. It was as though the gods themselves had willed it.

After all, this party is happening in that fortuitous window where I’m allowed to be as reckless as I want because I’m heartbroken. Tonight will be a purification, a baptism of sorts.

My phone buzzes and I reach for it straight away, misplaced hope still beating its wings inside my chest. That familiar adrenaline rush each time the screen lights up. But it’s always an email, a group chat, or the bank telling me I’ve gone into my overdraft again.

I fight back the urge to reach out to Nick again. I’ve already triple texted, and Kate said I should have never messaged him at all. She said it’s better to let men come to you. She said you should never pay or plan a date. You should wait for them to make the first move. Every time. But I didn’t buy into all that TikTok ‘feminine energy’ bullshit.

The message on my phone says; What’s your address? Friends on their way to the party. My party. The one I’m throwing just because I can. Because, unlike Nick, I’m still in my 20s. I can still party every weekend if I want to. I am so young and so hot and so free.

I traipse to the shower, queuing the few songs on my party playlist that decisively aren’t about love but about parties and drugs and sickening, sparkly don’t-need-a-man girl power. Afterwards, I smudge silver glitter across my eyelids and apply a slick of black eye liner. I unearth a small Ziplock bag from my bedside drawer, dig a key into it then sniff.

I look in the mirror to check for powder around my nose. I’ve seriously never looked better. If Nick saw me now, he wouldn’t be able to resist. I imagine him showing up tonight and begging me to take him back. I think about ignoring him from across the room. I think about getting off with one of my friends to make him jealous.

There are no wrinkles on my face yet, but I can picture where they will stake their claim in a few years’ time. I raise my eyebrows and give a big smile. I think about getting preventative Botox. One day those lines will be permanent. One day I will be Nick’s age and men in their 40s will still date women in their 20s. And I will know that I have been complicit in it all. Did the guilt belong to me or to him?

I had often wondered who the fool would be. The whole sordid thing was pre-destined for embarrassment. Either he was the sleazy old man using me for my body and stealing my youth or I was the gold-digger with daddy issues.

In the eyes of the world, I would always be the young, naïve fool or the malicious, materialistic whore. Which one am I really? Well, it depends on the day of the week. I fake the big smile I will give guests at the front door.

My phone vibrates again and my heart skips.

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Around this time, I started going to London as often as I could to meet up with complete strangers that I had found in the ‘London Rookie Mag Meet Up’ Facebook page. We would sit in Southbank Centre and make friendship bracelets or hack away at vintage National Geographic magazines with craft scissors. We’d walk around Chinatown eating cheap dumplings and talking about clothes and bands, or lusting over magazines in Wardour News (RIP.)

Rookie Mag was a US-based online magazine founded by then-15-year-old fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson. Rookie’s influence sprawled out across Instagram and Tumblr, and across the Atlantic into this London-based Facebook group. We met up a few times, before losing touch when we went to university, but I still think about those internet friends from time to time or watch them on social media from afar. Those meet ups were transformative in that deeply life-changing way that things can only be transformative when you are a 15-year-old girl.

More than a decade on, everyone is talking about logging off and going analogue and I have been thinking about those Rookie Meet Ups again. Thinking about how social media has catalysed some of the best, unexpected moments in my life. Thinking about how social media used to feel more social. It used to feel like a lifeline. But this isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about what comes next.

When was the last time social media felt fun?

Pre-2016, dog filters, flower crowns and Valencia-tinged sunsets floated through the digital ether. But I’m not sure there was ever a Golden Age of social media. There was never a time when it wasn’t blamed for everything.

Recently, however, the attitude has turned particularly sour.

Everyone online is posting about going offline. 2026 has been hailed as ‘the year of analogue.’ I don’t really mind the so-called hypocrisy of these posts. They reveal the paradox at the heart of the matter. Quitting social media remains a fantasy. Most of us can’t quit, so we have to live with it. We don’t have to love it, but we’ll feel better if we don’t hate it.

It’s not wrong to feel despondent about our increasingly phone sick society. The very act of participating on social media inevitably means putting more money in the pockets of some very bad men. Disillusion is spreading like a computer virus. We dream of throwing our phones out the window, against the wall, into the sea. But we won’t do it. There must be another way.

Let social media be social

Last autumn, I went to an Inklings event in London. The writing collective was founded by and and in November, they hosted a book swap in a cafe alongside a Q&A with where she talked about her writing process and Substack. That night, I stepped back out onto the rain-slicked streets of London armed with a new resolution.

This year I want to use being online to be more offline.

Online, we are exposed to the ceaseless, competitive grind of the algorithm. As job market scarcity reaches fever pitch — particularly in creative industries — leaderboards and like counts encourage us to see everyone as a competitor. In short, every platform feels icky. Every platform feels a little bit like LinkedIn. But offline, there is still space for creative inspiration, connection and collaboration. There is still space for friendship and community.

The word ‘community’ has been gutted and sold for parts to make us buy new trainers, but we can still resist its commercialisation. Only, that resistance doesn’t happen online. ‘Online community’ is a bit of an oxymoron. Finding a community on social media is comforting when you are lonely or geographically marginalised, but true community happens when you go outside.

I would rather feel the real, earned high of making a new friend than the fleeting dopamine rush of a new follower. I would rather experience the friction of leaving my bedroom to venture into the cold night and attend an event alone. I would rather take the risk, knowing that I could stand awkwardly in the corner and speak to no one — but I could also make a friend, have an interesting conversation, get inspired.

But, wait, isn’t this essay about not hating social media?

Well, yes. That’s how you discover these events. I’ve been to film clubs I found on my TikTok, writing groups I found on Instagram and coffees with people I met on Substack. Being online to be more offline is nothing new, but reframing my social media ‘end goal’ around enriching my offline life has made me feel better about my relationship with my phone. It’s made social media feel fun again.

But social media isn’t designed for us to be offline. The ‘social’ part has always been a lie. It wants to keep us lonely, angry and glued to our phones. And yet even when all these unsavoury feelings arise after too many hours scrolling, it still feels safer to fall headfirst into the bottomless pit of the endless scroll than to go out and meet people IRL.

A message without a response is easier to handle than a rejection from someone you have met in person. Meeting an internet friend – a stranger – offline, or going to a new meet up or activity group requires much more friction than posting online does. But it offers much greater reward.

The next stage of the internet will not be social at all. People are already speaking to ChatGPT like it’s a friend, swapping real human interaction for an AI chatbot out of fear of judgment or rejection. In a few year’s time, we might look back and long for the social media of today because at least there was some social element to it. We might mourn that we didn’t take advantage of that more. You can’t meet up with an AI chatbot for coffee or dance with it in the small, glittering hours of the morning.

If I’d moved to Paris 20 years ago, my life here would be unrecognisable. And it would probably be lonelier. It’s easy to feel the pull of nostalgia when you imagine Paris in the ‘00s captured through the lens of a digi cam photo. But you can still take digi cam pictures today. With friends you met on TikTok and Substack and Instagram. Nostalgia springs from hopelessness. And I don’t want to lose hope.

I’m not saying that social media isn’t damaging and addictive. That the tech overlords that run it aren’t actively making the world worse, but I’m not sure that posting about hating social media or going analogue actually does anything to cure these issues. You are still feeding the same machine you profess to hate — that you spend so much emotional energy despising — when you could be using that same energy using social media to promote offline communities. Spaces where creativity and connection can flourish unencumbered by the algorithm.

Social media can still be social. It can be tangible — enjoyable, even — but only if we choose to reach out beyond the screen and into the lives we want. To take the risk; to reach out to someone new; to find the offline community we crave so deeply because that’s what it means to be human. It might be time to stop hating social media and start using it to enrich our offline lives instead.

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Last month, I quit my full-time job at a magazine.

In many ways it was a dream job — travelling to festivals abroad, interviewing musicians I loved, covering Glastonbury. For two years, I was in charge of social media at an independent music magazine. It didn’t always look like it does in the movies. I wasn’t jetting around the world with rockstars and writing long form profiles à la Almost Famous. But I did get to go to a lot of concerts, and going backstage sometimes felt like being a character in a film.

Despite the typical magazine job drawbacks, — stagnant pay, little progression, shrinking teams — my experience was mostly positive. But last year, I felt a growing frustration and disillusion that hummed in the background as I told myself over and over that “a million girls would kill for this job.”

Back in 2017, I was photocopying newspapers during my Vogue internship, when two women walked past giggling, one of them repeating that infamous Devil Wears Prada line. The one that lives rent-free in the minds of Magazine Girls everywhere. If a million girls would kill for this job, you tell yourself, then you better be grateful to have it and not complain about the exploitation or instability or low pay. The Magazine Girl self-mythologises to justify her position.

Last month, I was having coffee with a friend who had applied for a job she would be overqualified and underpaid for. “You have to be in it to win it,” she said.

“Win what?” I asked.

A few years ago, I would have believed there was a logical end goal — a prize to win. A cushty Condé job or a five-figure book deal. Now I’m not so sure.

Everyone I know who works in magazines feels the same way to some degree. We talk about changing careers; studying to become lawyers or teachers or marine biologists. But we won’t do it. We’re in too deep. It’s like a romantic relationship that blows hot and cold, or a drug that felt incredible the first time you took it.

It’s a well-worn tale. Aspiring Magazine Girl gorges herself on a diet of Vogue magazines and ‘00s rom coms and snarky comments on High Fashion Twitter. She studies English or journalism, honing her writing across blogs and zines and student newspapers. She lands her dream internship at university and starts writing articles for some of her favourite magazines.

But then she graduates and everyone says the industry is dying or dead. First it was the internet that killed it. Now it’s AI. Anyone who keeps trying is a fool who will end up broke and alone, clutching their chest from a stress-induced heart attack at 60. Making a liveable income as a journalist in a major city today sometimes feels as unrealistic as becoming a world famous rockstar. Anyone who keeps trying has to be delusional.

To quote one of the greatest 21st-century philosophers (Mark Corrigan from Peep Show), it all feels a bit like this:

“Let the dream crumble. Lovely crumbly dream that I can’t even eat with custard.”

But it wasn’t always this way.

Once upon a time in the 90s, writer salaries could stretch into the mid-six figures. Cover shoots could cost up to $850,000. Editors enjoyed chauffeured town cars, five-star hotel stays, all expenses paid fine dining, private jets to shoots and hefty clothing allowances. When Graydon Carter joined Vanity Fair in 1992, there was “no budget at all,” meaning, “the budget had no ceiling.”

At Condé Nast, much of this extravagance was expensed from the personal wealth of its billionaire owner, Si Newhouse, rather than revenue from magazine sales. This level of extravagance couldn’t last forever, but I’m not sure anyone could have predicted how far the industry would fall. When computers arrived in the late 1980s, one Vogue art director called them “a phase.”

“It’s all mythology now,” said former Marie Claire editor Lesley Jane Seymour. “I don’t think anyone expects perks of any kind anymore. The whole thing is over. It’s a bygone era.”

The crazy perks have vanished like a Covid-era micro-trend, and with them, much of magazines’ cultural authority. You only have to look at the TV we’re watching to see the shift. Where Sex and the City, Girls and The Bold Type centred magazine writers, Gen Z’s buzzy I Love LA focuses on influencer management instead.

If any job now mirrors the excess of the magazine industry’s golden age, it’s influencing, but even top influencers are in a more precarious position than journalists were. They are self-employed and at the mercy of platforms they don’t control.

A few years ago, my university tutor asked whether he should change the name of the course from Fashion Journalism to Fashion Journalism and Content. I said no because it didn’t sound as glamorous, but content today has the potential to be far more glamorous than journalism can afford to be. When I interviewed a successful magazine editor, she told me that sitting front row at Chanel felt like a pinch me moment, but she was still thinking of quitting to go into influencing or consulting.

The decline of the Magazine Girl was further evidenced when news of Anna Wintour’s predecessor arrived last September. It should have felt like a revitalisation. Instead, it felt like a death knell — a small drop in an ocean of disillusionment. Although the announcement was decades in the making — and fuelled as much speculation as the next James Bond — it felt flat, distant and unimaginative. Much like many recent issues of Vogue.

“Magazines need journalists and editors who actually inspire, include the next generation of creatives and speak to an inclusive audience, which is why Chloe Malle’s appointment as head of editorial content at US Vogue landed so badly,” writes BRICKS editor in her Substack, Is Vogue embarrassing now? “Her appointment is hardly aspirational for readers already exhausted by the industry’s relentless cycle of nepotism.”

The Magazine Girl we want to see today looks different from the one we would have seen three decades ago. We want editors we can trust, who excite us. That means employing people who are interesting, not just the ones who were born into celebrity or aristocracy, or even who have the most Instagram followers. In the era of AI slop and enshittification, the Magazine Girl’s taste making feels more necessary than ever.

Of course, magazines aren’t always the perfect vehicle for this. They are increasingly bound by advertising and clickbaity content strategies. Editors come with their own set of blind spots and biases. They can be exclusionary and elitist. But I still believe human taste is more interesting and challenging than algorithmically generated recommendations.

As the internet splinters cultural authority, we increasingly look to algorithms or AI to guide us. When faced with infinite choice, it can feel easier to let a machine tell us what we like than to absorb all the contradictions of human taste. But these hand-picked recommendations feel more expansive, messy and challenging. Real people make unexpected connections and open hidden doors.

The Magazine Girl still exists, even if the conditions that created the fantasy have expired. The dream lives on in our imaginations and Pinterest boards while contemporary Magazine Girls consider leaving their jobs for consulting or influencing or PR — positions where they can transfer their skills for more money and stability. But many of them will stay in overworked and underpaid positions.

The 1940 film His Girl Friday – one of the OG Magazine Girl movies – sums up this contradiction. Newspaper journalist Hildy plans to quit the business for a life of domestic stability. She says she wants tradition and security, but her ex-husband — and editor — suspects she’s lying to herself.

“You can marry all you want to, Hildy, but you can’t quit the newspaper business.”

“Oh! Why not?”

“I know you, Hildy. I know what quitting would mean to you.”

“And what would it mean?”

“It would kill ya.”

When I quit my magazine job last month, I thought about quitting the industry entirely. As I move into freelance work, I’m trying to broaden my skillset so I’m less tethered to a sinking industry. Still, I don’t think I can leave it behind completely. In some small way, it would slowly kill me. I have that fatal combination of ambition, delusion and masochism that means I can’t let it go.

My favourite scene in The September Issue is when Grace Coddington gazes out at the gardens of Versailles and reflects, “I think I got left behind somewhere because I’m still a romantic.”

The Magazine Girl dream is a romantic dream as much as a career aspiration. It can be a yearning for something that no longer exists in its earlier form. But fashion and culture must keep moving forwards. If you don’t adapt, then you can’t survive.

So, does the Magazine Girl still exist? Yes, she’s still writing for magazines. But she’s also on Substack. She’s on TikTok. She’s on YouTube. If you have ever fantasised about being a Magazine Girl, seek out magazine writing, not just Substacks. Buy print media. Pay for digital subscriptions. Nostalgia and Carrie Bradshaw screenshots won’t help the industry survive. So, support the journalists whose taste and style you trust, wherever they publish.

The Magazine Girl is dead! Long live the Magazine Girl!

Thank you for reading! The next part of this series will look at whether Substack killed the Magazine Girl, looking more closely about where and how this archetype exists in 2026.

What did you want to be when you grew up? Did you get close? Does your dream job still exist?

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December disappeared in a cold fog of frosted mornings and festive hangovers and goodbyes. As one such wretched hangover took hold, I awoke at a friend’s house, rolled over and opened Instagram to a headline asking; ‘Why are all the lonely girls going to Paris?’

It felt like a personal attack.

That day, we cured our aching heads with ibuprofen and a Wetherspoons fry up, but that question clung to my mind like the stubborn hook of a catchy pop song. Why was I moving to Paris? Was I lonely?

The truth is, I have always loved being lonely in Paris. I love it best in spring when the city feels dangerously alive and you can walk through the golden streets in just a light jacket. When the terraces overflow and people watching becomes a professional sport. But I am learning to love Paris in January too, when the city is grey and wet and sub-zero degrees, and being anything other than lonely would feel out of step with the surrounding mood.

There is an exquisite self-indulgence to being alone in a city like Paris. You can linger before every monument for a beat too long. Daydream all afternoon in corner cafés. You can step out into the street with nothing but your curiosity and dreams and silent anticipation. You feel so anonymous and so alive. Always on the brink of becoming. Frighteningly aware that anything could happen.

The films of the French New Wave often show women alone and adrift in Paris; from American student Patricia in Godard’s À bout de souffle to Cléo wandering the city’s streets and cafés in Varda’s Cléo 5 à 7 to Louise in Rohmer’s Les nuits de la pleine lune, who refuses suburban life with her partner in a bid to hold onto her independence, and her one-bed Paris apartment.

Paris itself is more than a backdrop for these women. It shapes their freedom. They are not feminist heroines, nor are they particularly likeable, but they embody a contradictory femininity that allows them to question society’s expected roles and embrace the joys and possibilities of being alone in the city. Their love interests hover omnipresently, but they know that these men are not the answer to all their problems. They possess an existential ennui that feels very French, but that had long been treated as the psychological terrain of pseudo-intellectual men.

In her Self Magazine article, the one I first saw on Instagram, Jenna Ryu asks if we have been fed a cinematic fantasy that “being alone in Paris is somehow more elegant and meaningful than it would be anywhere else.” It’s a fantasy with roots in the French New Wave that has expanded into contemporary, international media like Emily In Paris and The Summer I Turned Pretty.

Ryu hypothesises that, rather than putting romantic partnerships on a pedestal, the city really celebrates “the beauty of solitude, particularly for women.” After all, when women feel increasingly let down and disenchanted by dating, the romance of Paris remains. The love fantasies we gathered from books and films might often leave us feeling alienated and unfulfilled by dating in 2026, but as Humphrey Bogart immortally put it in Casablanca, “We’ll always have Paris.”

Like any city, Paris is not merely a canvas for finding yourself after a breakup, or at any other time. It has all the grit and hardship of every big city, with issues like anywhere else; rising costs, tiny apartments, a fractured job market, pollution, inequality, over-tourism. People try on cities and singleness like costumes, when this is not a French New Wave film, nor an American series about being in your 20s. Sometimes it is beautiful and romantic and sometimes it is just hard.

Being single in Paris isn’t all cinematic, meandering strolls and philosophical epiphanies. On the days when I’ve witnessed one too many kissing couples and loving glances in the street, I go home and spend the night inside my phone, swiping on Hinge. I go on dates and drink too much Ricard and sometimes I become one of those kissing couples in the street, pretending not to notice the Eiffel Tower sparkling in the distance, lest my Parisian date thinks I’m just another tourist. But the next day, the hangover sinks into my bones and that aimless ache returns. I turn my romance inwards again and then back out to the city.

In Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin writes that, “nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.” In the novel, the freedom of being alone in Paris when his girlfriend goes to Spain is too much for David to bear. The unrestrained possibility of the city set ablaze each night in all its resplendent beauty. The temptation to stay out drinking til sunrise, to follow your heart and your desires because Paris convinces you that you can. Freedom can feel heavy as often as it feels light. Too much of it can drive you to the brink of insanity.

In one of my favourite Substack essays, writes how, “when you’re alone, the world feels enormous and public and raw, like it’s been blown wide open…You start to feel like just about anything could happen.” She explores the delicious contradiction of being alone in the most romantic city in the world, ultimately asking, “Do single girls have more fun?” When it comes to fun, I’m not so sure, but I do think being single makes you more adventurous.

If I were in love, or had been recently, I’m not so sure I would have moved to Paris at all. I think the yearning to move might have grown dull and blunted if I had a person to pour my romance into. Lacking that person, I chose to pour that love into my life — into my new life in Paris — instead.

It is the city of love and I have not been in love for more than half a decade. Perhaps I am trying to train myself in romance. As if staring at Rodin’s The Kiss for long enough will open up my heart and manifest real love, made from flesh not from marble.

I am writing this from a corner café near my apartment. There are people all around me, writing or sketching or painting. Most of them are on their own, but no one looks lonely.

Loneliness isn’t always a problem to be solved. It’s a feeling to explore. It can be a waiting room on the way to a destination, or it can be an invitation — to take lonely risks, to explore knew terrain, to meet people you would have never met otherwise.

Because joy isn’t only found in late-night love affairs and endless sun-drenched afternoons, the kind where everyone you love most in the world has cleared their calendars to spend time with you. Some days, on days like this, it feels as good to feel bad as it does to feel good.

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Nouvelles Femmes by Ericka Knudson

This book unpacks the impact that women had on the French New Wave; as actors, muses, writers and directors. It combines gorgeous film stills and posters with rich political, sociological and cultural history. Probably the most impractically heavy thing I carried with me to Paris, but it was worth it.

Do single girls have more fun? by

An essay exploring the beautiful potential of a solo, single weekend in Paris. The whole piece is gorgeous, but here is one of my favourite bits;

HOT PURSUIT OF PLEASURE

do single girls have more fun?

I spent last weekend in Paris, eating oysters and not kissing anybody…

Read more

a year ago · 319 likes · 28 comments · Ismene Ormonde

When was the last time you took a risk?

Sometimes you need to close your eyes and throw your fate overboard, not knowing whether it will sink or swim. Give up everything you know on a gamble and a prayer.

I’m writing this somewhere between Lille and Paris, balanced on that curious precipice of blind faith and delusion. The train is crawling through a mist of snow and ice, floating through the black vacuum of January. It is a dark, bitter night, the kind of winter dark where you can’t help but think a little of death. I’m feeling dramatic, dangerous, delusional.

It’s fashionable now to say that new year’s resolutions are pointless. Winter is the worst time for new beginnings. New year, new me is a corporate ploy to funnel more money into gym memberships. If you have to set resolutions at all, make sure they are realistic, otherwise you will hate yourself all the way through to 2027.

But, to that I say; why can’t we just have fun with it? Setting crazy, lofty goals is one of life’s great pleasures. This year, I’m pouring my hard work and good luck into an ocean of delusion. I’m baking all the figs from my tree into one delicious pie. I’m taking a lifetime of cautious planning and happy accidents and sad regrets and running with them. I am going to have a year of delusion.

When I write about delusion, I am using the co-opted, internet definition of “being delulu”, not its official definition of “believing things that are not true.” Being delusional or “delulu” describes unrealistic or overly idealistic beliefs. It means pursuing a Sisyphean feat with the steadfast conviction that you will complete it; setting the target too high, entering a race you will probably lose. It means going against logic and setbacks to chase your crazy, precious dream.

For me, this year, that looks like moving to Paris, setting up a freelance career, writing a novel, becoming fluent in French and falling in love (this last one is a little out of my control, but I have been the number one dating app cynic for years and it’s time to get over myself, so we’re manifesting romance again in 2026.)

These are all things I have been dreaming of doing, but putting off because I was waiting for the perfect time. Because I thought these dreams were too big and delusional to tackle with any conviction.

These are the rules:

1. Don’t get pregnant

2. Don’t lose all my money

3. Don’t die

If I stick to them, then what’s the worst that could happen?

One week before my fateful train ride through the snow, I was at the cinema watching Marty Supreme. The film is a masterclass in delusion. No doubts. No backup plans. Just dogged determination, delusion and a dream. Marty Mauser goes through hell and back to make it to the ping pong world championships. It’s a dream that seems insignificant to many of the people in his life who don’t see ping pong as a serious sport, but nothing deters his pursuit. The release of Marty Supreme, its hyperactive marketing campaign and Timothée Chalamet’s SAG Award speech on “the pursuit of greatness” all point to a wider trend that encourages delusional dreaming.

There is an entire cottage industry dedicated to it. ChatGPT thinks every idea you have is the best one ever. The Artist’s Way claims the universe will meet you halfway if only you start. Influencers get rich and lucky off our attention then command even more of it to tell us how we can do the same. Endless instructional Substacks urge us to live your dream life and just do things. I gobble them up every time because this kind of delusion is delicious and addictive.

And yet, delusion feels more irresponsible now than ever. Everyone says, if you have a job, don’t leave it because there are no jobs right now. In an impossible job market and an unstable economy, staying where you are is the safest choice.

The same goes for being in a relationship. Surely, you’ve heard that Hinge is the fiery pits of hell and, if you’re coupled, you basically got the last chopper out of Nam. You might be dissatisfied with your job or your relationship, but if you are otherwise safe then the advice is to stay put. Even young, ambitious dreamers are falling for this scourge of scarcity and advising caution lest you end up in the terrifying purgatory of being single and being unemployed.

But why should you sacrifice your life, your youth, for something that is out of your control?

What if you flip it all around? If everything is as awful as we say it is, then what do you have to lose? You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. So you might as well do. And here’s the thing; if someone tells me not to do something, it only makes me want to do it more.

I quit my job last month to move to Paris and write. I am not like Marty. I have a backup plan. I’m applying for part-time jobs teaching English and, if money is still tight in a few months, I’ll apply for part-time hospitality work too. But every time I explain my backup options to someone, they look at me with a half-smirk and say, “I don’t think you want to do that though.” They want me to stick to my plan A.

Sometime last spring, I admitted the dream out loud. I was lying in the grass at Parc Monceau, sweating in black denim because it was hotter than I thought it would be. I was talking to a new friend about wanting to quit my job and move to the city long term. She asked if I was planning to do the whole ‘writer in Paris’ thing. I blushed and laughed and admitted it was true.

When I was much younger, I would not have been embarrassed by that. More recently, I would have felt ashamed for dreaming too big and irrationally. But I had already been a writer in London. Would doing it in Paris – where the rent is cheaper – actually be that different? I’m 28 and I feel young and old at the same time. Someone calls me brave and I wonder if that means I’m being reckless.

There is never going to be a dream worth pursuing without risk. There is never a dream that is entirely safe. And you cannot cordon yourself off from failure, embarrassment and mistakes just because a dull, steady life feels easier. Insight springs from discomfort. Nothing fun or interesting ever happened from playing it safe. You have to trust yourself to take measured risks. Delusion is power. It is the first step to getting the life you want.

Maybe the problem with choosing between delusion and realism only arises because we think everything is permanent. Really, most things in life are reversible. Spend a year being delusional then two being realistic and then repeat. This year I am really trying to love the process, to let my delusional goals be the guideposts for building my dream life. The small daily tasks build up to the grand, delusional dreams. Each day feels like getting closer to the person I am meant to be.

Should we be delusional or realistic? Ask me again in a year.

What would you aim to achieve if you didn’t care about being delusional? What’s the biggest, most delusional risk you’ve ever taken? Let me know in the comments, send me a DM or find me on Instagram.

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