On setting up infrastructures of care for the people who need them most

Are there any skills that you wish you’d learned and that you’d recommend to someone trying to fortify themselves in the fashion media industry?

Learn to fucking video edit. It’s the one thing that I feel like an absolute… what’s the word? Like a philistine. I’ve tried to sit down on [Adobe] Premiere Pro and I’m just like, “How does one do this?” In essence, it is the same skill as editing a piece, it’s crafting a storyline. If you have a visual eye, if you know how to shoot a video on an iPhone, play around—do that. It’s not saying that words are dead. They’re not. But when you learn how you can see [a story] through a different lens, it sharpens how you approach your more native medium.

I’m a babe for TikTok. I love going on there. I like videos where people are in their kitchen or car just talking and it’s super lo-fi. Maybe it feels attainable, more relatable, I don’t know. But words are not dead. There’s something special about print. Like me, someone that publishes non-fiction, I think about the weight, texture, the art direction, reading experience, accessibility… all of those things. But when you write for digital, does attention span get in the way? Because everyone’s attention span has really shifted.

Yeah. A lot of it is just trying to really hook people in on snappy headlines. That’s a skill in itself; I’m fucking terrible at it. I like a waffly intro, I like scene setting. My favorite writer is W.G. Sebald. He’s a German writer who weirdly lived in Norfolk for all of his life. He does the longest, waffliest sentences that go on for pages and pages. I love that sense of being transported… That’s something that I don’t necessarily try to bring out in my writing per se. I prattle. That’s just the way that I naturally write, which doesn’t necessarily lend itself to an SEO-friendly [search engine optimization] first line. But I’ve been doing [journalism] long enough to find ways around it, so that I can switch into a mode better approximated to the needs of that kind of writing.

That’s a really good skill: learn how to be flexible and to attune yourself to the context. Maybe that just comes from trial and failure.

A lot of trial and error. I remember when I first started at i-D—which would’ve been what, 2019? I remember getting an edit back being like, “Yeah, this is very elegant prose, but you read like an asshole. This is so self-indulgent and it’s so floral, you’ve just written this for your own pleasure.” I guess maybe I had. But it was such a good point, and a necessary guidance moment, because I was like, “Oh yeah, I’m writing for a fucking widely read online platform.” At the end of the day, the person who’s reading this does not want to read my knockoff version of Proust. [laughs]

Writing exercises are a great idea, sharing your writing with others and not being afraid to do that before you do something as big as sharing it on a digital platform or in print.

Exactly, and don’t be afraid of an edit. Generally, the feedback that you’ll get from a well-meaning editor is in your best interest, because they read so much every day and have a solid understanding of what the platform wants. It’s not like a character assassination, or [them saying that] you’re a shit writer. If you’re not at the point where you’re contributing to platforms, then opening your writing up as and when you feel comfortable to an audience—even if it’s a self curated audience—will only help shape and nuance your voice, and help to develop its texture.

That’s a beautiful add-on to the fortification question. Last year a student from CSM asked me for coffee to go through my books and explain how things came together, because they wanted to know what to do after they graduated. And I was like, “I didn’t study writing, I didn’t study any of that, I just did it.” Sometimes it can seem like the most obnoxious thing to say to someone, “Just try it or just do it.” I probably went to the nth degree of not having published anywhere then suddenly bringing out a book [laughs]

I really empathize with that.

Are there any nonfiction writers you love?

I love Ryszard Kapuściński’s Another Day of Life. He’s an incredible nonfiction journalist. It’s a very dark, quite intense journalistic account of the Angolan Civil War… I was born in Angola. My father, who was English, was assassinated. He was an aid worker. He was killed driving home on a project. I think there’s perhaps a sort of morbid fascination with that, but also the way that [Kapuściński] humanizes but also extrapolates the horrors and the realities of war.

How old were you when that happened?

I was 11 months old. That’s always been a book that I’ve had some affiliation with, because of the context of what it recounts but also because of his extremely vivid, very humanizing, very harrowing approach to literary journalism.

It’s almost as if because you were that young when that happened, you’re seeing it through the lens of the writer, and I’m assuming whatever it is your mum has told you.

Yeah, totally. I’m fully cognizant of the fact that my draw towards that particular book is very much because of my own personal history that is completely unresolved and never will be. But I think that it’s still interesting how someone who is a straight, white, Polish gonzo journalist in the ’90s can write about a situation that I have some sort of abstract emotional relationship to, in a way that still feels compelling. I’ve read other books of his as well, but I guess that’s the one that sticks out.

I’d like to jump into some other heavy questions… Something very specific to women of color, especially Black women and trans women, is hypervisibility and hyperinvisibility. Obviously you’re not the spokesperson for the whole trans or GNC [gender non-conforming] community. But as someone who is on a special trajectory, I want to know how you feel the creative industries can serve trans women and GNC people on a granular work-culture level?

I don’t necessarily feel well-placed to speak objectively [but] I’m more than happy to give you my thoughts, because I identify as trans non-binary, or gender non-conforming and femme. My own understanding of my gender has developed a lot in the last year, from thinking that I was on a trajectory towards binary transition. There are parts of me that indulge or engage with the performance of masculinity. I feel like I can now engage with my masculinity without feeling like a boy, which is an interesting moment to reach: the dispelling of one’s own dysphoria.

You’re embracing your fluidity, your own choice.

Yeah, exactly. Certain people like Kai Isaiah Jamal or Gray Wielebinski [have] been really illuminating [for me to realize,] “This is who I am for now.” I’m very open to wherever it leads. I can’t necessarily speak to the realities of people who are in most need of very specific and direct accommodations in their work environment. [But for example,] if you are going through a medical transition, there needs to be a greater awareness of what the realities of that are from the perspective of mental health. When you’re on the ‘mones, you are essentially going through a sort of self-induced puberty. That’s not easy. If the world around you doesn’t recognize that and just thinks that you’re being a histrionic bitch, then that isn’t going to lead to fair treatment in the workplace. There aren’t necessarily accommodations for the fact that you are doing what is, for you, a necessary step in your transition journey to make yourself feel more aligned with who you are.

It’s not an easy process. It’s always been explained to me as, imagine going through puberty again, but with all of the difficulties of being an adult…

And the scam of adulthood at the same time.

Having the awareness in this context almost makes it even more of a head fuck.

Other things are, more nuanced conversations and accommodations around recognizing how people want to be perceived and the fluidity in that. This is one, not just my current workplace, various workplaces that I’ve been part of, where I think that I’ve struggled in the sense of; “Oh, I’ve presented this, which means I have to keep this up.” It’s having that fear that I’ve spent three months going to work full femme, and now I can’t be bothered to shave because I’m going to get razor burn… feeling that pressure to keep up a certain thing and feeling like I’m almost letting down people’s…

Idea of you.

Yeah, exactly. It’s not to say that gender is relative, because it isn’t. What you identify as, what you want to say is your gender, is your fucking gender. But you can get into a really weird headspace with it, where you feel like it’s a responsibility to perform a certain thing, and that if you let down that performance then you’re sort of invalidating your own perception of how you identify. So I think that we need a greater fostering of understanding around making people feel accommodated, however they choose to turn up in the workplace.

Less speed, more conversation. Maybe even more so in fashion—because it is fast-paced, there is less time for reforming internal culture, for looking after people.

Yeah, it’s an interesting one. I think that fashion can be an industry where the optics of care are very much leaned into. There’s a real sense of performing, a sense of having a social diligence or consciousness, in large part because of the way that it works on this ultra-rapid trajectory—which is also sped up so much as a consequence of much bigger macroeconomic and social realities that have affected a lot of industries, in a way that basically just puts everyone on a much faster hamster wheel. These things do affect everyone. A lot of people, regardless of their gender expression or their race, end up having horrible breakdowns. But the people who are the most vulnerable already are the ones who end up being the most vulnerable to fall out of [an industry or workplace].

I’m speaking on a big macro, institutional level. As you mentioned yourself, there is a need for a greater stocktake of what it actually takes to set up these infrastructures of care for people who actually need them.

Absolutely.

And can’t actually afford them, beyond the remit of; “Have you taken some time off?”; “have you thought about speaking to someone?” I was like, “I can’t afford therapy.” There are people who can do that. That’s fucking fab for them. I have been in a position where I have been able to afford that for myself, and it’s helped me to no end, but not everyone can. That needs to be part of the stocktake or the due diligence.

It’s about how you help the Dolls thrive.

Exactly. It’s not just about protection of the girls. It’s about platforming, it’s about offering opportunities. It’s about putting infrastructures of support in place so that when they’re on those platforms, they’re actually able to thrive. It’s a pressure cooker, and it is an industry that thrives on a fascination of a certain image and a standard of image. If you feel out of sorts about the way that you look and the way that you present, it’s fucking intense to go into an industry where half of my job is looking at images of generically beautiful cis people. That is a difficult thing to be confronted with, but it shouldn’t necessarily preclude me from being involved in it. But I do sometimes feel a bit, “How do I feel about how I look?”

There needs to be a real assessment of the reality of what this industry is and where its shortcomings are when it comes to accommodating certain people. Because I feel like this is the conversation that we were having five years ago, post BLM [Black Lives Matter]. They’re not the same, but there are analogies to be made and similar conversations and discourse about what inclusion actually looks like.

Do you think that fashion is afraid of critique?

This is a multi-layered question. I would say it’s not really a secret. Even when it comes to fashion shows, no one can really write a review anymore, just because of the way that fashion as a creative industry is bound to a particular commercial infrastructure that props it up. That ethos does trickle down through many, many tiers of the industry.

There’s maybe a need for a greater humanizing of the industry where critique is not character assassination. Often critique is born of desire for improvement, right? You critique something because you want it to be better. There’s a need for an understanding of that. That is the function of critique; that is the point of it. Or at least in my opinion, good critique does that. Critique is necessary for healthy functioning. It’s the same with any society. If you don’t have people criticizing the government, then what happens?

Fascism.

Exactly. I think it’s the same with any sort of institution of that scale. There needs to be a healthy, critical body that keeps things in check.