One year ago I left my corporate fashion job to follow a more conscious life.
My job gave me pleasure and pain, and enabled me to buy my first home in west London. Like a secret diary, I started to blog about my journey into a more sustainable existence (shoe collection excluded), as head of PR for a shoe brand at the time…. I vowed to do-up my new home with as many old, reused and reclaimed things as possible.
One bedroom, one bathroom, one garden, one kitchen… now my walk-in wardrobe, and one woman taking her first steps into a salvage yard.
One foot in fashion, one foot in salvage, often up to my knees in reclaimed building materials, but refusing to part with my knee-high boots, whilst dancing in mud with reclaimed radiators from the roaring 20s. I started to question, are these industries really so different? Both can be intimidating, but as soon as you cross the facade, you find the heart of great stories. The reason I fell for fashion PR in the first place.
Fashion at an unsustainable pace, ticking-off trends rather than expressing personal taste left me cold compared with the storied pieces of individuality I was dressing my home with. This is when I decided that I not only needed to claim to love my fashionable life, but reclaim it.
Designing my home with reclaimed materials was a style choice as well as an ethical, environmental one. Reclaimed Woman is my attempt to find fashion and home fashions that don’t compromise ethics. A space to retrieve yourself, be real, inspired and conscious, because the examined life is worth living.