EDITOR’S NOTE

I’ll let you in on a secret: We were supposed to have two cover stories this month – one featuring the up-and-coming teen actress Talia Ryder who’s proving to be as big a force in social activism as she is on the silver screen (pg 86) and the other, an equally woke and outspoken popstar-on-the-rise. However the latter never happened because said celebrity’s plans to visit Singapore were stalled due to the ongoing global health epidemic.

I don’t quite know how to put this gently except to say: Oh, COVID-19, you really (insert expletive here) things up.

I write this from my room at home, having been asked by the company to go on selfquarantine after returning from Paris Fashion Week Fall/Winter 2020. (Good advice, boss.) For over a week, I was repeatedly squashed up alongside many of the world’s fashion press, KOLs and VIPs – often in enclosed spaces – watching some of the most glamorous fashion put out in seasons go down runways while statistics to do with this virus and their socially fracturing effects steadily went up.

Even well before I had left for the trip, half of our team had been assigned to work from home as part of operational safety measures. Besides the disruption, it would mean that – come the end of this isolation period – I would have gone without seeing most of these colleagues for nearly a month. This is a business that thrives on/needs social interaction. That and I miss them.

This edition in which we look at some of the world’s most pressing issues through the lens of fashion was planned way before most of us had even heard of the term “coronavirus”. Working on it in the shadow of so much uncertainty and bad world news has been surreal and has inevitably induced some serious introspection: Whoever introduced the notion of taking things for granted?

We know that what we’ve done in this book is not going to save the world. (It also explains the tongue-in-cheek approach that we’ve taken with a few of our stories; my favourite of which – the brainchild of fashion editor Imran Jalal – is on pg 38.) Neither are we oblivious to the irony of us covering issues like climate change (pg 56), sustainablity (pg 66) and mental health (pg 98) when fashion remains one of the world’s most wasteful, narcissistic and stressful industries.

As a fashion magazine that’s committed to the roles and values of journalism though, what we hope this edition will at least do is to encourage informed dialogue about these issues. As one of our favourite local songbirds Narelle Kheng points out in our feature on mental wellness: In our search for answers, it is important to be able to have open conversations.

There are enough problems in the world. Let’s not add silence and ignorance to the list.