The canary
April 2024

Things I think about when I’m running
February 2023

The Parasocial Dilemma
May 2022

Fast fashion’s reckoning cannot come soon enough
February 2022

January: The waiting room of the new year
January 2021

Can we ever win with sustainability?
December 2020

Why can’t I write anything?
September 2020

The good, the bad, the dumb and the dangerous
May 2020

Design through the political lens
April 2020

Hustle culture and the burnout generation
November 2019

Sorry for being sorry
October 2019

Master of none, but expert generalist
July 2019

Your mental health coping mechanisms are nobody’s business
July 2019

Talking about alcohol
May 2019

Fast fashion’s reckoning cannot come soon enough

February 21st 2022


Credit: Stella McCartney

It’s been a few days since the first Pretty Little Thing x Molly Mae fashion show at the Londoner Hotel in Leicester Square. An awe-inspiring variety of women walked the catwalk, with typically marginalised bodies, skin colours and abilities all strutting their stuff. Models were adorned with familiar pastel-hued synthetic crop tops, oversized blazers and slicked-back buns - all a signature staple from the brand, found on the pages of the biggest Instagram models and TikTokers. Pulsating lights and R&B music set the ambience of the show while influencers sat in the front row, the event documented via their Instagram feeds. At the end of the show, Molly Mae Hague, Love Island contestant and influencer now turned Creative Director of PLT, walked out onto the runway to explosive applause and praise usually reserved for the top fashion designers of our time. Cultural cornerstone The Mirror called the show “stunning”. To the naked eye, this show seemed like a huge win - inclusive models, accessible fashion on show and an all-around successful event.

Except all was not well. Outside the Londoner in the pouring rain and wind provided by Storm Eunice, a protest was taking place. Organised by the organisation Oh So Ethical and activist Venetia la Manna, the group stood by the entrance bearing placards of ‘Pay your workers’, ‘there’s nothing pretty about wage theft’ and ‘we all have the same 24 hours in a day’ (paying homage to the now-infamous podcast quote from Miss Hague herself, where she told people to stop being lazy and to achieve their dreams with all the a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps energy as a conservative talk show pundit). The group was protesting the outrageous, yet unsurprising claims of wage theft and unsafe working conditions carried out by PLT’s factories and subsidies. The brand was accused of modern slavery in 2020 by the Independent and exposed of paying their factory workers in Leicester as little as £3.50 per hour, while staying open during the first Coronavirus lockdown and achieving enormous success during an otherwise turbulent period for retailers. “These motherf*****s know how to exploit people like us. They make profits like hell and pay us in peanuts,” a factory foreman was quoted, per The Sunday Times. While factory workers were forced to come in to work during one of the biggest outbreaks of Covid in the UK, the CEO of PLT, Umar Kumani, purchased a £1.5 million diamond engagement ring for his fiancée.

The protesters waged on in the storm while show attendees snickered and stood awkwardly in the queue. In an embarrassing move for both Molly Mae and PLT, the British Fashion Council asked the company and the influencer to remove all claims that the show took part in the official London Fashion Week - even though both had stated that it was a part of the official yearly event. People raised eyebrows once more at the fact that PLT had appointed Molly Mae, a person with no creative direction or fashion design background, as the Creative Director of the brand - cleaning up an estimated £4.8 million per year. Whether an official role or not, it annoyed many in the creative industries - proving that it’s possible for those rich and famous to land roles that otherwise take years for the average person to achieve.

Many defended Molly Mae after the protest hit the headlines. “She can’t control what goes on in the factories”, one said. “She would change it if she could” said another. Or, the classic, “people love to hate on a woman doing a good job”. To all of these points - I totally disagree.

As a public figure with an army of publicists, enormous wealth and ample opportunity to do the research for herself, it is an undeniable choice that she makes to be associated with this brand. The same could be said about the SHEIN collab with influencer Georgia Toffolo - a brand that has been labelled ‘the worst of the worst’ by environmentalists for their shady and secretive supply chain operations and dirt cheap pricing. Imagine what would happen if a figure of their influence told the brand that they would drop the association with it if they didn’t improve their supply chain issues - the statement and effect would be enormous. To have an audience of that size and to educate the mainly young, impressionable girls about the horrors of the lives of garment workers in Bangladesh and how we can shop more sustainably. Maybe one day it’ll happen. Until then, we’re stuck in an endless cycle of people knowing how awful these companies and their practices are - from wage theft to stealing designs from smaller brands - but falling prey to these enormous corporations and their rapid growth in one way or the other. As for the #girlboss perspective of hating on a woman for doing her job? Until the female garment workers in PLT’s factories are freed from their sweatshop prisons, you can take every plus-size model and hijabi influencer in their fashion shows as 100% performative.

At the end of the day, those with the means and the influence need to make the choice to align themselves with these brands or to wage an offensive against them. In both our heart of hearts and in black and white, we all know how fast fashion is destroying our planet. We need to decide whether to succumb to that £2 tank top from the H&M sale or to take a look at exactly why these brands are giving away their clothes - literally - for pennies or for free. It’s not an excuse to say we don’t know about these practices, because it’s becoming increasingly obvious that we do - people just don’t want or are unable to make the change. Until the day comes where fast fashion companies can be held accountable for their actions and real change is implemented, we’ll be tuning into fashion shows after fashion shows, full of microtrends and plastic clothes.

Diary entry // January: the waiting room of 2021

January 7th, 2021

On New Year's Eve, I went to bed at 11pm after watching a TV film with my mum, accompanied by some takeaway sushi and a huge cup of herbal tea. To be honest, I wasn't really lamenting the absence of a dirty rave somewhere, huddled outside in the rain, smoking and shouting in somebody's ear about how you knew somebody at the party. I just felt a bit tired, and I think the majority of the population did too. I also slightly dreaded the upcoming weeks, as I do most New Year's.

I've always found January to be the worst month. With the big C word aside and the already likely premise of civil implosion in the US - well done, guys! We made it 6 days into the year! - the month has always stood out, or rather festered like an untreated wound or a bad hangover, as one where the world seems to go stagnant. Christmas holidays are over. You've spent all your money on things like gym subscriptions, which you can't use due to obvious reasons, and online courses that you bought in a moment of frenzied enthusiasm which now sit, untouched, on your desktop. It's grey outside, with a half-assed amount of sludgy snow on the ground and a wind that feels like frozen knives hitting you in the face. It gets dark at four thirty. To add insult to injury, you're still in this weird lockdown that you wouldn't have been able to fathom a year ago. Things are weird.

January sits as the waiting room of the upcoming year, where you sit in a tightly-packed room with people who don't talk to each other, an air of nervousness and expectation that you can feel on your skin. The objectives and results of the upcoming year could be compared to receiving some worrying medical results, or maybe as a huge sigh of relief when you realise that the thing you freaked out about in December will actually turn out to be fine in the end. The mood is awkward and full of potential, while people look wistfully out at the warmer months to come.

For some, this month is an stale, depressing amalgamation of stress of the upcoming year, a feeling of failure, the anxiousness about the state of the world and the underlying feeling of not being in control. I personally have felt the effects of this type of January since last week, with an uncertainty of where I'm going to live, who I will be able to see, and the not-knowing of the future ahead. On the other hand, maybe taking four weeks at the start of the year to get all your worries and thoughts out might be better than spreading them out equally throughout 2021. I don't know.

The other way of looking at it is with an optimistic, or rather realistic lens, which I know for some can seem very difficult at the moment. The saying of 'we're all in the same boat' is bullshit, and I've often found it offensive that we can compare people working since March in essential jobs, earning minimum wage, to people working from home with a garden and food delivered weekly. Everybody hurts differently right now. But what can be said is that if you can make the time, January might not be so bad after all - if you want to make it so.

Some things I've appreciated over the winter break and up until now have quite literally kept me sane over months, serving as a daily affirmation and comfort that I hope can help people out over the next tough weeks. Here are three:

1. Plan your breakfast before you go to bed. If you're going to be working from home for the foreseeable, then one thing I've enjoyed, weirdly, is deciding what I'm going to enjoy when I wake up. You'll go to bed looking forward to the next morning - and I'm not sure if this is the extent of my social life and excitability in 2021, but it has helped me wake up with a sort of immediate plan that I can check off as soon as I get up.
   
   
2. Checking off, goals, checklists. Something I've become concretely committed to is checking off the things that I need to do for the upcoming day, whether that be something as important as booking a dentist's appointment or just to do some internet research. No matter how big or small, you'll be able to feel better knowing you've done something that you needed to do and can put it to the side. The 'ticking' off the button beside the task is just delicious.



3. Make an obscure goal. I've decided that my weird goal for the month of January is to do a crow's pose, successfully. It's been a yoga pose that I've always hated and fall out of constantly in my practice, but now I've been determined to train a little bit each day in order to finally do it without falling flat on my face. Whether it's doing the splits, learning to juggle or do a backflip, a physical goal will make you feel better both mentally and within your body.

So. While January - and god help us, February too - might be looming like a black cloud over our heads, let's try and treat it like a time where you can just be present and focus on yourself. Make it the most selfish month, where you can make it all about you - focusing on things that make you happy and letting yourself fall out of it at times, too. Take a deep breath. We are all moving slowly and together.

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Hi guys! I hope everybody is coping and looking out at this upcoming year with some hope and optimism - as hard as that can be. This article is from a series of upcoming diary entries that I would like to - hopefully - send out each month. I’m planning on writing more often, and a good way of doing that is to write down the things that have been going on in my own life while still focusing on bigger, more long-form essays. Let me know what you think! :) @fraeji

Self-help special: Why can’t I write anything?

14th September 2020
This article stopped me from ranting on Twitter.
BTW, follow me there: @fraeji



Occasionally, when I'm spring cleaning my Notion or digging though my hard drive for something I should have labeled properly, I come across drafts of articles I started, realised for whatever reason that the topic was of no interest to me anymore, and subsequently abandoned. Usually when I stumble across these I experience some sort of full-body shudder, cringing at my previous eagerness and optimism that I now, as a more experienced human being with, thankfully, none of that premeditated naivété would never write about something so cringey, so stupid or plainly uninteresting. I feel awful, looking back over my failed drafts, that I could have been so uninspired or boring, that I actually wanted to publish that - ha! I shove the drafts into an unnamed folder and move on with my day, relishing my newfound maturity and know-better.

What gets to me when I think about this is that I could have been writing about something that I found fascinating and engaging at the time. Reading an article about empathy last month sparked an interest in the neurological actions behind the emotion and I went down a rabbit hole of articles and discussions, leading me to draft the first paragraphs of what I thought would be a gripping and well-written article. I got about halfway through the writing part and realised that, though the subject matter enticed me, I couldn't add a formidable or solid opinion to the subject matter. I just wanted to write about how cool I though the subject was, a show-not-tell ramble about a subject that I found so fascinating at that moment. I gave up, shelving the draft for another day where I'd stumble across it and feel that familiar feeling of imposter syndrome once again. This process only happened about a month ago, and now I look back with the gaze and opinion of somebody who knows better, who knows that she wouldn't write about that. Why? Do we as humans just lose interest in things far too quickly?

My writer's block has been in full effect since about May, when I wrote this article. I remember getting so enthralled and excited about the subject matter that I sat and wrote the article in about an hour, typing away furiously in my confidence and vigour. The feeling once finished; a kind of after-workout satisfaction that you have produced something worthwhile. You go about your day afterwards feeling like you've earned some artistic merit, even if the article itself is less than stellar. Writing is a process, as you know, and you've put pen to paper and created SOMETHING.

I often found myself in the last weeks going about my day, reading something that caught my interest and making a mental note to sit down and write about it, to research at least. I'd hype myself up, strategising in my head and feeling overall optimistic until I'd go to get my laptop, when I would have this sudden feeling of disinterest - the idea would extinguish immediately. I'd feel let-down with myself and disappointed that something I cared so much about, that I couldn't stop thinking about for hours, was suddenly so far from my realm of interest. It gave me the impression that what I once counted as significantly engrossing wasn't actually as cool or zany as it I initially thought. Rinse and repeat; when you do this often enough you begin to feel as if you might not be as creative or intellectual as you think. I think it's probably one of the shittiest feelings you can feel as a creative.

I also don't think it has anything to do with lockdown and feeling that general pandemic/the world is ending/dismal job prospect anxiety. If anything, all this time off should have spurred some insane creative drive in me.


lol

I think many creatives, be it a writer or a designer or a musician, often have this kind of imposter syndrome. You know you have the capabilities and the drive, but the execution is poor or maybe just not as good as you thought. You have to break things down and start again to perfect your craft, and unfortunately this crippling feeling of self-doubt is just a part of life. After all, you didn't think you'd be making money with this job, did you?

So my question is - why the f*ck can't I write anything?

Am I reading the wrong things? Is being a writer just really hard? Does writer's block come as part and parcel of the job - five months of it, to be exact - and is it something I just have to suck up?

Genuinely though, I just wanna talk about this. Message me, read my articles. Anything to stop me from spinning in my chair at my desk and spinning my wheels like some uninspired, exhausted hamster.