Talk To Us Vancouver

Can you share a pivotal moment or experience in your life that shaped who you are today?

When I lived in Japan for a year. After high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do, but I knew for a fact that it was my dream to go live abroad, especially in Japan. When I was a teenager I was obsessed. There are a lot of things that have happened in my life, and especially after high school, things were really difficult, so I knew that I had to change the scene. And my Dad was very supportive of this, so he helped me set up my working holiday visa and I lived there.

I lived in a shared house with maybe 30 people. It was really interesting; I lived in a dorm room with five other girls. Yeah, I have got plenty of stories, chapters after chapters of it. That was a pivotal moment for me, definitely. I was very sheltered growing up, so never really leaving or taking public transit or anything. I used to live in the countryside and everything and going to one of the biggest metropolises in the world – it’s just such a night and day, and I would never exchange that experience for anything, even through the good and the dark times while I was over there as well. It was not all rainbows and sunshine either, but there was a lot of really good experiences that I take with me.

How did you decide to go into fashion?

Again, starting in that dorm room there was one girl, she was a model. She’s German. Most of the girls that I lived with were German because it was through a German company that I went there, so that’s why. I learned a tiny bit of German, very little, but that was a lot of fun. And then another girl, she went to fashion school, also in Germany. A lot of the people in the shared house were very adventurous and in this industry it’s very volatile, so you have to be kind of like okay to go with that. So yeah, it was kind of because of them, and because I was very different. Obviously, 98% of the population in Japan is Japanese, so I stuck out a lot. So a lot of that made me think, “Oh, okay, maybe I want to try modelling.” And especially in Tokyo, it is one of the few fashion cities in the world, so you got to see really interesting things over there that I never saw before and it allowed me to experiment a lot.

Posted November 4, 2023
Interviewed October 22, 2023
UBC, Vancouver