Hi!

The first ever installment of my first ever newsletter

Hi!

Welcome to the first ever post of my first ever newsletter. It’s been so cool seeing how many subscribers I’ve been getting since I announced this a few weeks ago. If you’re a little surprised to be hearing from me, that’s probably because you signed up to my mailing list after buying my book a while ago (if so, thank you!).

This newsletter is a space for me to go further into the issues I look at in my book — consumption, greenwashing and sustainability in fashion, and how we can make sense of them. I’m really excited about it, although I’m feeling a bit rusty — this is the first time I’ve been consistently writing since my book (which I wrote two years ago), and that was the first time I’d been consistently writing since I left my Highsnobiety job at the end of 2018. I’m not complaining — if there’s one thing I feel like I was put on this world to do, it’s writing. The reason I’ve been doing it so sporadically is, honestly, it’s just become harder and harder to make a living from doing it (thanks Big Tech). I’ve spent the past few years paying the bills with copywriting, consulting, workshops, panel talks, strategy and consumer research, and of course, my book.

But a recent trip to New York really hammered home how much potential there is for someone like me to make a living from their platform, and I finally decided to make the jump onto Substack a few months ago after a lot of encouraging words from friends and peers in the city (thank you Bruce Pask, Lawrence Schlossman and Recho Omondi!). Since then, I’ve been throwing story ideas around, agonizing over colours and typefaces, getting feedback from friends and putting a strategy together with Substack’s Writer Development team (hi Christina!).

The newsletter format gives me the space to comment a lot more on what’s happening in fashion, while I’m free to write with more depth and nuance than I’d ever be able to on Twitter or Instagram. I’m hoping it well give me all the best bits of my old job — talking to interesting people, examining what’s going on in the industry, and writing about it all — without all the traffic targets, politics and burnout that come with working a regular media job. Most importantly, I’m hoping that the paid subscription model will allow me to build a long-term career from critiquing the industry — something that feels impossible inside “proper” fashion media today.

I have so many fond memories of my time as a fashion editor, but the sad truth is it’s not a life-long career anymore (unless you’re sitting on a trust fund). It’s a really tough time for the media business in general — Google and Meta take the overwhelming majority of online ad money, leaving magazines fighting for scraps, and the Big Tech companies are so powerful that strategy changes in Silicon Valley turn the publishing industry upside down in a heartbeat (“publishers eat shit from Silicon Valley,” as someone once put it). That turmoil at the top means stress, low pay, and more stress for the majority of media workers, and that’s especially true for the editorial team (aka the writers).

And with fashion in particular, the industry has become so consolidated that brands don’t need magazines like they used to — why pay someone to advertise your new collection when you can do it yourself on Instagram? Behind the scenes, most publications have morphed into agencies, doing everything from event production to creative strategy and influencer marketing. That’s meant that writers have become less and less important to fashion titles, even though their work is still what everyone on the outside sees. Plus, the pressure to keep advertisers happy means nobody can afford to ask difficult questions — even though that’s what the industry so urgently needs.

Don’t get me wrong, fashion editorial is a great job to do in your 20s — I moved to Berlin to work at Highsnob when I was 25, and spent my time there learning the industry inside out, meeting hundreds of interesting people, and getting good at writing. But once life got serious and the stress reached a tipping point, I couldn’t do it anymore, and that’s true across the board — almost all of the editors I used to sit next to at fashion week have moved on to consulting or have gone full-time at brands and retailers.

Substack gives me the opportunity to get back to what I do best — writing about fashion! — and the direct-to-reader model means I could one day make a living from writing what I really want to write, and what really needs to be written. The first month is going to be entirely free, and from October onwards I’ll be switching to a mix of paid and free content — some of what I write will be completely free, for anyone to get in their inbox.

In the coming weeks and months, I’ll be looking at the dirty politics behind polyester, pondering traditional shoemakers’ place in the age of sneakers, reporting on how fashion students feel about the future, and putting Ganni’s sustainability work under the microscope. Plus plenty more that I’m not going to talk about just yet.

It feels great to have a space that I can call my own, where my writing can reach people who want to read it, without worrying about it getting lost in the algorithm or watered down by editors. If you become a paid subscriber, you’ll be supporting an independent, critical perspective in fashion at a time where the industry so desperately needs it. Paid subscriptions give me the chance to someday make a living from doing what I do best — writing about fashion! — and I’m really, really excited about that.

See you next week

🖤

Alec