Nice things we bought over the holidays 🌻
+ personal style over fads, and the year ahead in pop culture
🤡 Blame our holiday brains, but we sent an email to some of you last week with the wrong rates to subscribe. Sorry! It is actually only $7 a month, or $84 a year.
We’re back! Welcome to 2025, and Ensemble’s newsletter on Substack – we can’t tell you how delighted we are to have you here.
We were emotionally and physically exhausted at the end of last year after unexpectedly taking back Ensemble under our independent ownership, but we’ve taken time over the break to recharge, reset and refocus on what is most important to us when it comes to Ensemble. The answer is pretty much YOU, and we’re excited for the freedom and possibility of what we have to offer you all in the year ahead.
We’re going to be real with you guys: we’re still figuring it out (if anyone working in media currently tells you they have all the answers, they are lying). But we know that you, our beloved community, will allow us some grace while we do so.
We’ll be experimenting with our content and where it sits, with some available only for paid subscribers here on Substack – and some for you to enjoy, for ‘free’, on the website. Plus we’re going to ramp up our events schedule and IRL opportunities - watch this space.
One thing we do know heading into 2025 is that if you love and appreciate something, you can’t take it for granted. It’s the year of putting your money where your tastes lie - whether that be your favourite cafe, fashion brand or media platform.
We consider the work we do to be valuable, and while we want people who are struggling with rising inflation and the cost of living to be able to access it, it does cost us money to create. So if you can afford to support us (for the price of giving up one oat flat white a month for those who live in Aotearoa’s exorbitant city centres, lol 🫠) and sustain the work we do, we know the entire Ensemble community will be grateful.
It’s only day 14 of 2025 but already, SO much has happened. We were heartened by the response to the submissions on the Treaty Principles Bill (you still have time to do yours, though you’re cutting it fine: the deadline has been extended to 1pm today, Tuesday Jan 14 – click here to do that), and heartbroken by the wildfires in Los Angeles (we know friends and acquaintances whose homes burned down or who have been evacuated).
So we wanted to kick off the year with some lightness and levity (yes, whimsy). Two of the nicest women in New Zealand fashion about how they embrace personal style over fads, and we round up upcoming shows, films, albums and exhibitions to look forward to.
Plus, for paid subscribers: our ‘nice things’ column, with recommendations that we genuinely bought, tried and loved over our summer break. This month, you’ll find this at the bottom of this newsletter, behind a paywall.
Thank you again to all of you who have upgraded to a paid subscription, or become a founding member; we love and appreciate you!
Stylists on how they avoid the trend cycle
By Cait Emma Burke
Is Margiela’s iconic Tabi actually a shoe I’ll get a lot of wear out of, or has it cemented itself as a silhouette I like because every fashion content creator owns a pair? Do I suddenly want to put charms and trinkets on everything because I’ve been a lifelong Jane Birkin fan, or because I’ve been exposed to them every time I doom scroll social media?
If the trend cycle feels faster and more omnipresent than ever, that’s because it is. The short life cycle of online micro trends is enough to give you whiplash, and for many consumers, the ubiquity of each new trend is making the process of cultivating and maintaining their personal sense of style much harder.
So how do people with genuinely great style who work in fashion (read: stylists) avoid the trend cycle trap, and what advice do they have for anyone who’s feeling too influenced by trends?
The pop culture moments we’re looking forward to
If 2024 taught us anything, it’s that you can’t predict what pop culture lore will come to define the year (think of last year’s obsessions with brat, demure and Luigi) – but we’ll try our best. Click here for the films, albums, concerts, TV shows, books, local exhibitions and more that we’ll all be talking about over the next 12 months.
Nice things we bought, and loved, over the holiday break
In December we subverted the rules of our regular Nice Things column, including a few ‘nice things’ that we wish we could have bought but didn’t… due to recent unemployment, and general anxiety around the future.
But, as promised, we’re back to normal(ish) programming! We’ve taken a look at our bank statements to see what we spent our own money on over the holidays, from Rebecca’s European shopping to Zoe’s end-of-year nesting.
As always, it is a strictly #gifted free zone – we bought everything with our own hard-earned cash and genuinely think you might like them too.