Why subscribe?
Starburned is a newsletter on culture, love, nostalgia, style, taste and nightlife. It’s for the restless dreamers, former Rookie Mag readers, 365 party girls, chronic nostalgia sufferers, social media agnostics, dating app haters and perverts.
In short, it’s a little bit of everything I love and hope you’ll love too.
What to expect
Free subscribers get regular essays on themes of nostalgia, dating, creativity, clubbing, moving cities and finding your taste/style. These are largely personal essays through the lens of culture, but they are sometimes cultural essays through a personal lens.
Paid subscribers get all of that plus access to my short stories taking the horror of some of the above experiences and twisting them into actual horror. Think a suburban hometown that eats you alive, a woman who cuts off her finger in a bid to fall in love and a ghost that haunts an ugly new build.
Here are three essays to get you started:
What is taste and how do you get it?
How long is too long to be single?
Why does pervert winter feel so cold?
Who am I?
I’m Sophie, a fashion, music and culture writer from the UK, currently based in Paris. I ran a fashion blog on Blogspot for 10 years as a teenager and have worked professionally as a journalist for the past five years. As opportunities in freelance journalism dwindle, I’m back in my natural habitat; what we used to call the blogosphere, but now just call Substack.
I spent my teen years enmeshed in the Blogspot/Wordpress fashion blogger eco-system, writing about runway trends and taking self-timer outfit pics in my parents’ back garden. I liked the freedom to experiment that blogging gave me. It felt more anonymous than most social media does now.
As a journalist, I have written for Vogue, i-D, Dazed, The Face and Cosmo, among others. I’ve written articles about dating doomscrolling, 2010s fashion blogging, sustainability and size inclusivity in fashion. I started freelancing properly in lockdown, but recently freelance journalism has grown even more precarious than it was during the pandemic. Now, I work in social media for a music magazine which is a fun job, but I miss longer form writing, so that’s why I started ★ starburned ★ .
The name comes from the Caroline Polachek song from I Saw The TV Glow, my favourite film I saw at the cinema last year.
You can follow me on TikTok and Instagram to see more of my work.
Join the ★ starburned ★ group chat below!
