Growing up in the hood in Northern Ireland is where I find many of my reference points when I have to dig deep - especially because I was surrounded by women who were anything but wallflowers, yet had a quiet, confident softness to them.
At sixteen I worked weekends on the deli counter of a supermarket bang in the middle of one of Portadown's notorious estates. My mornings were spent slicing meat and serving coleslaw to the local mob and their wives.
The mob-wife uniform of choice for pushing a supermarket trolly around? …A shell suit, tight around the bum and thighs, with stilettos - often red - a handbag on a gold chain, a packet of Bensons, a full face of makeup and big hair. In winter, a fur jacket went on top. Obviously.
These women did aerobics on speed, smoked like chimneys and raised families, often single-handedly, while their other halves were doing time.
Whenever one of them appeared at the deli counter, all six butchers would miraculously emerge from the back. When one of the men turned up, they scarpered.
Parents' evenings at school feeling more like fashion shows. One mum has stayed with me forever: thigh-high leather boots, fur coat, Gucci bag, giant gold hoops and hair that defied gravity.
Years later, doing a fashion degree in Belfast, our fancy-dress nights evolved into shell-suit nights. We recreated the women we'd grown up around, turning a very particular slice of 1990s Northern Irish culture into our own kind of uniform. And I realised for myself - there's something surprisingly empowering about a shell suit, stilettos and a bouncy blow-dry!
Fast-forward to London in the 2000s. I was leaving a big magazine company to join ELLE when a female colleague told me, "You might be going to ELLE, but you'll never get a job at VOGUE with that accent." I took her words more seriously than I should have. Back then, VOGUE felt like the preserve of a certain kind of woman: polished, posh and from West London. I lived in the grimey East because that’s where the raves were.
When I arrived at ELLE, the atmosphere felt like a strict girls' school. Silent desks, cold stares, not a radio in sight. Meanwhile, I'd turned up in a black catsuit, bleached-blonde hair and a tan, still riding the high of Ibiza. Despite already being naturally blonde I felt the need to be even blonder, white when possible !
My new colleague's opening line was, "The gym's downstairs. If you don't go, you're not going to survive this job." I remember thinking, Yes, but I bet you don't go dancing for twelve hours on a Friday night.
We were worlds apart. My wardrobe was an extension of my social life: tight black lace, nights out after work, the unapologetic pleasure of getting dressed up and looking good. I'd grown up around women who made an effort, even if they were only popping to the butchers for Sunday's roast.
They had plenty on their plates, but they still showed up for themselves.
And here's the thing: these women who taught me how to occupy space weren't the women society necessarily held up as aspirational. They came from a world with its own rules, its own codes and its own contradictions. But they had a presence I never forgot.
That accent my colleague thought would hold me back? VOGUE headhunted me 3 years later.
I hadn't needed to erase where I came from. My background had given me a set of reference points that no corporate job could teach me: how to read a room, how to find the humour in a situation and how to be un-interested in other people’s opinion of me.
It's also why I've always felt at ease around cultures where people express themselves with a little more colour, volume and vibrancy. I recognise something familiar in the refusal to make yourself smaller and conform.
One of the parts of my work which I love the most is helping women find that part of themselves that existed before they learnt which bits to hide. The part that wants to have fun, express, take up space and live a more boldly. The part that gets buried under professional expectations, social conditioning and the exhausting business of being acceptable.
You don't need a shell suit or a pair of red stilettos. (though I definitely encourage you to try it at least once ha ) But you might need to ask yourself when you stopped dressing, speaking, creating or living in a way that felt unmistakably yours.
I’m most comfortable when Im creating my own world - and it’s one that has it’s fair share of vintage fur jackets and high heels because that’s a part of my culture that shaped me well - and I want other women to feel the same way. Because when we create from the heart and express the soul, we step into alignment, our frequency raises and we slide into our highest timelines with ease rather than hustle.
And being in the highest frequency of alignment is what its all about. …once you make the internal changes the external automatically follows.
