A Lucky find from across the pond...
...just a little bright spot worth sharing.
If you like what you read, the greatest compliment you can give me is to share with your friends and family. You can do so by hitting the button below. Now let’s get into this week’s I was just thinking about…..
Back in February I was scrolling TikTok mindlessly when something stopped my thumb. It was a simple video (see below) featuring various women walking through an office—all of them looking chic as hell. As each woman flashed on the screen, her outfit details were listed alongside her. My fashion-starved, work-from-home self was instantly intrigued. Seeing this many well-dressed women strolling around an actual in-person office felt almost novel—like a call back to Devil Wears Prada and the early aughts glory days of editorial newsrooms. I went down a rabbit hole watching several more videos on the account and “smashed the follow button” as my 5-year-old would say (damn you, YouTube).
There’s no shortage of fashion content on TikTok but something about this formula—fashionable women displaying a range of personal styles, shoppable outfit details readily available sending my little endorphins sparking, snappy videos with very little (if any) VoiceOver—feels fresh and down right delightful.
Later on I Googled the name of the account—SheerLuxe. It meant absolutely nothing to me at the time. Turns out it’s a fashion and e-commerce site founded in 2007 by an entrepreneur named Georgie Coleridge Cole based in the UK. I’m still marveling that such a publication survived the printpocolypse that was 2008 (unfortunately for me, the exact year I moved to NYC in search of a career in magazines just as every single one was laying off all but skeleton crews of long-standing editors). More amazing still, the publication has thus far survived the digital race that has left most others with little budget and tiny staffs. I spent a couple months ‘liking’ every video the SheerLuxe team put out on TikTok and then decided to take the plunge and subscribe to the daily newsletter.
Something I should note, I subscribe to a lot of newsletters. At this point more than ten ranging in topics from fashion, to parenting, to tech, and world news. I love them (clearly, since, here I am writing one). Newsletters are for me what podcasts are for some of my friends. I collect them, I learn a lot from them, and they remind me of the glory days of personal blogs which I used to follow in the double digits and write myself. SheerLuxe has quickly become an inbox regular that I can’t wait to open on a daily basis. Why? I’ve been thinking about that myself and it hit me this week as I scrolled through their gift guide (beautifully styled and packed with great gift selections, by the way).
I love SheerLuxe because it reminds me of another delightful publication from my youth—Lucky Magazine.
For the uninitiated, Lucky Magazine debuted in the year 2000 and was published until 2015. I was a freshman in high school when the first issue came out and a true fan from day one. I remember gleefully peeling back and placing the post-it-note-like stickers included inside the issue on each page that held an item I wanted to add to my wardrobe (almost none made it there but a girl can dream). Lucky had a fresh concept. It was a magazine for and about one thing: shopping. Obviously a retail focus is not new for women’s magazines but Lucky was unique in its tone and its unabashed commitment to featuring product above all else (a refreshing twist when other mags were lauding celebrities on every single page). It was a light, fun read; it was a celebration of the thrill of the hunt for that one piece that is going to make your closet sing. An article published in the New York Times captures its uniqueness well, "It was, in retrospect, ahead of its time, a print rendering of a shopping portal on the Web. It was well received by both the news media and advertisers, in part because it was a well executed magazine that did not take itself too seriously."
That same levity and fulfilling frivolity is what has me opening up the SheerLuxe newsletter every day. I think we can all agree that the state of world is quite heavy at the moment. It takes almost no effort to find what’s difficult and upsetting in the media. But, silly little sparks of light can be tougher to come by. For me, fashion has always been an escape. I love to see how others dress themselves to face a day. I look for the glimmers of self expression that speak to an individual. Stumbling upon SheerLuxe gave me a space to play in for few moments every morning.
While I’ve slowly stopped following every single American magazine over the years for various reasons—so many ads and barely any content, celebrity articles and not much more, next to zero actual fashion in the pages—I’m delighting daily in what I’m finding in the Lucky-esque digital world of SheerLuxe. Three ways to wear has rescued me on several days when I couldn’t muster up a single outfit idea. Payday buys gives me a fun little browsing session when the direct deposit hits every two weeks. How to style gets me thinking creatively about what I want to wear next. It’s just great fashion media. The editors aren’t curing cancer and they know it and I, for one, love it. I’ve been thinking about how nice it is indulge in a playful state of mind and find a connection to a past favorite all at once.
Still thinking about…
(a few things haunting me on the Internet)
I can’t help but want to start decorating for the holidays and these $25 artificial trees I snagged in an early Black Friday sale at Michaels gave me an excuse to get going.
A cute, on-trend sneaker at a pretty unbeatable price.
This announcement from OpenAi (creator of chatGPT) that has me intrigued and also terrified.
A smart and pretty way to display all those holiday cards soon coming our way.
A new-to-me product that perfectly shapes my brows and stays all day.
A creator I can’t stop watching on TikTok. Give me ALL the beauty insight!