DENIM & DUMPLINGS

DAY JOB

Last November I flew to China to work with our factories and decided to take a roll of B&W film a friend gave me.

It’s times like this I really, really, really wish my parents had made me learn Mandarin.

The amount of times I’ve walked into a factory in China or sat down at Yum Cha in Sydney and seen the looks of shock and disappointment, I may as well be a Gweilo.

The stern disappointment the yum cha trolley ladies show me is especially shameful.

It’s lucky our factories have amazing merchandisers who work with us via email everyday. Their English is on point and they help to be interpreters between me, the patternmakers and machinists in the sample rooms.

This time I stayed near the factories instead of in Shanghai so I was able to spend a lot more time with them. We worked along side each other, working through designs, draping fabric on dress dummies, flat pattern making.

It was a heartwarming mix of creatives coming together, communicating with strange hand gestures when words were not understood.

Couple of phone snaps

Love these people

35MM – A NEW HOBBY

000005260023 — I sat in a cafe in Copenhagen across the road from these guys for ages until they saw me and threw some peace signs my way

Last year I found my mum’s old film camera and decided to snap a roll of film. I developed it and the photos were terrible but nostalgic and I loved them.

Knowing not much at all about apertures and shutter speeds didn’t help. So having to figure all that out on film along side all the variables like film type, iso, lenses, focal distance etc was a bit of a mess. Also the amount of times I’ve left the lens cap on my rangefinder camera is laughable.

What I knew going into this was that I would be terrible. What I didn’t realize was how character building it would be for an impatient, irritable person like me. I’ve definitely learned patience during this process and also putting thought and effort into taking 1 photo as opposed to firing off 10 on your iPhone, checking them to see that none were great and then snapping an extra 20.

I haven’t really found a schtick for my photography. It’s pretty random, lots of travel, some work related content, food, people, houses, 1 pregnancy shoot that I convinced my friend to let me experiment on her with, a shitty old couch etc.

13 rolls of film, 4 cameras (2 of which I broke), 7 months later, I’m still only scratching the sometimes very out of focus and over or under exposed surface.

Flickr link for some of what I’ve shot so far.

HIATUS

It’s been awhile…

Exactly 570 days since my last post and let’s just say I’ve seen some shit.

I’ve started a new job, traveled a bunch to China, Paris, Hawaii twice, Byron, multiple trips to Melbourne and 90% my friends have had babies, while I’m sitting over here nursing a food baby.

However, what remains the same are my life goals: All black everything, travel where possible, eat burgers, dumplings, ramen, any kind of smoked and BBQ’d meats, cheese, any and all the carbs, mac and cheese (my biggest weakness), any type of pasta really, especially gnocchi and I can’t forget hot wings… You name it, I’ll eat it, after a quick check online for reviews, obviously.

I originally had a thought to compile a recap post with photos from the last year and a half. BUT then I thought, why the hell would I do that when currently, at my pretty lazy finger tips, I have a whole lot of content for future blog posts. This, in turn, requires less of me being photographed awkwardly in obscure locations and backdrops, while still being able to provide exciting and relevant content. SO instead of a recap, you get a photo of me enjoying the start of a feast and a bottle of Rosé at Restaurant Hubert and the possibility of semi regular posts on fashion, food, travel and life in general.

I’M BACK … for now 🙂

In the meantime go and check out Hubert’s menu. All the dishes are amazing but you HAVE to try the Steak Tartare and the Malakoff (it’s pretty much a deep fried gruyere bomb) and see why they opened up last year to 2 chefs hats.

TRAVEL

HONG KONG

LONDON

Recently I was lucky enough to travel to HK and the UK for work. Typically even though it was a work trip, I couldn’t help but document it all.

Much to the dismay and embarrassment of my work colleagues, who really should be used to it by now, I took to the streets like a full blown tourist, camera strapped to my neck and throwing out peace signs where ever I could.

It’s amazing how awkward people get when you pull a camera out. It’s like the biggest taboo and screams TOURIST. But news flash, HELLO, I am a tourist. I’m in a country that’s not my home and I want to document it. Crazy notion right?

Also being in a relationship with a photographer you kind of have to get used to having a camera out a lot and spending WAY longer in one place than a normal person. Hours are spent timelapsing on a rooftop in Manhattan’s Lower East Side capturing the sunset or sitting on the concrete when it’s 5 degrees looking at San Fran’s Golden Gate Bridge for way longer than you really need to, you’re cold, tired, you’ve just driven all day up the Highway 1 and you just want a god damn PHO…

Freezing cold evenings or uncomfortably hot days aside, after all is said and done, it will be helpful when the Alzheimers sets in.

THAT ONE TIME IN SAN FRAN

SHANGHAI

I’ve recently had a little hiatus from the blog due to some crazy deadlines at work. Days and nights blurred together and weekends were spent on the couch binge watching Freaks and Geeks on Netflix. I was the definition of a couch potato, while eating potatoes, seriously I became a potato.

Amongst all the chaos of day to day life, I was also sent a last minute work trip with 2 colleagues to Shanghai and being my first work trip and my first trip to Shanghai, I was excited. Exhausted but excited nonetheless.

Work trips are weird, especially to a place you’ve never been to before. The explorer and foodie in me wanted to run around, do weird shit and eat everything. However, instead, our time was meticulously scheduled into time allotments for fabrics, supplier and factory meetings, fabric fair exploring, designing on the road and sitting in awful traffic, which would put Sydney peak hour to shame. Where was everyone going? Was there a secret dumpling festival that I was missing out on? A happy waving cat emporium that had just opened?

Luckily for us, we stayed in the beautiful Xintiandi and had everything on our door step. There was an abundance of cafes, restaurants, night life and every designer label that I couldn’t afford staring at us every time we stepped out of our hotel. Had we actually landed in Shanghai? Or was our plane accidentally misdirected to Paris? You could’ve fooled me, apart from the thousands of Chinese people wandering around.

Anyway, just because I was on a work trip, didn’t mean I couldn’t document everything along the way and eat every weird thing I was offered.

You can take the holiday out of a work trip, but it can still be an adventure.

Or I can at least make it look like one…

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