Wellness Wednesday: be bold

March 18, 2015

Anyone who knows me will tell you that despite how I dress, I’m about as far from being an extrovert as anyone could get. But sometimes it feels good to get out of your comfort zone. In fact sometimes it feels AMAZING to get out of your comfort zone.

Today I did exactly that at the VAMFF Fashion Industry Forum. I’d heard that stylist extraordinaire Catherine Baba was going to be on the panel, and having seen countless photos of her (starting back when I was working at Vogue Japan and had to put street style articles together) I of course wanted to meet her in person. But I have enough trouble starting a conversation with a regular person, let alone one of my style icons. I was worried that if I tried talking to her I’d look like a crazy stalker and wouldn’t be able to control any words coming out of my mouth and would seem like a gibbering idiot (even more so than usual).

Still, it’s not every day you can meet Catherine Baba, so I decided to give her a pair of earrings from my Wilderness Bazaar range with the thought that I could just say “I love your style, I’d be so flattered if you’d have a look at my earrings some time,” and then leave her to the rest of her adoring fans. But the scenario played out a lot better than that. Mademoiselle Baba took the earrings out of the box, exclaimed that they looked like boomerangs (true… although that is not what I had in mind when I designed them!) and put them on then and there, with a little help from me!

I had done a bit of research on her choice of earrings to make sure there was even the tiniest possibility of her wearing them, so I was explaining to her that I’d mainly seen her wearing big tasselly ones and asking whether these were OK for her. Well, even if she never wears them again, she was gracious and obliging enough to put them on for a few photos which made my day.