Welcome to Editor At Large: an Introduction.

Introducing my new Substack.

WHATEVER YOU ARE MEANT TO DO, DO IT NOW. THE CONDITIONS ARE ALWAYS IMPOSSIBLE.

- Doris Lessing

Welcome, dear reader, to what I have been quietly cooking up for months now, my Substack Editor at Large. If you are here from my Instagram Noelle Weigel Style, or if you have just found me here on Substack, read on - there are good things coming.

My education and career that led me to the glamorous world of luxury fashion & entertainment event management at a dizzyingly fast pace, never fully sat right with me. I was, dear reader, good at my job - rising to promotions faster than my peers & regularly pulling overtime without question in the pursuit of excellence. I loved my work in fashion & the wider fine arts culture, I saw it as uniquely powerful for shaping the public’s perception of both themselves and each other. Even the most fashion-disavowed still buys clothes that trickled down from the peak of fashion Everest - to effect that flow of influence & commerce is to have your finger on the pulse of the present. However, an industry is much larger than any one individual, and I found myself at odds with the sheer transience of it all. Trends, fashion collections, movies, promotion cycles, starlets careers, and even the very real people working the cogs of this industrial machine, flitted in & out of usefulness with an astonishing degree of callousness.

The day I realized that there was something fundamentally different about me from my peers, was the day Notre Dame cathedral was burning in Paris, April 15th 2019. Sitting at my desk at my office in LA, I saw the news alert flash on my screen and immediately showed it to my peers who shrugged with apathy. I, as a lifelong student of history, was horrified by the reality of what the destruction of one of the finest structures of western civilization would mean - was hundreds of years of civilization ending, today, without note? Another news alert flashed, “the nave of the cathedral was on fire and likely to collapse.”, it said. “Did no one in my office actually care?” I thought. I showed the alert to my superior in my next meeting, to which he too, shrugged and moved on to our agenda that day - something along the lines of shoe selects for an actress’s Tonight Show appearance, and shipment progress for the latest client collection to arrive in our sample room, if I’m remembering right. It wasn’t until LVMH, the great French luxury conglomerate, posted a personal note from their revered CEO on the devastation happening in Paris on their Instagram account, that my superior walked into my office to ask what all the fuss was about. That day I learned something about myself - I think in centuries, not days; in timelessness, not trends; and in the impact an action has on the wider world around me rather than the twitter feed cycle.

The header quote above has been running through my brain on a banner these last few months. The challenges of being a woman in the 21st century is that we feel forever rushed, and simultaneously behind on everything. This is why I like this phrase, because instead of dividing a life by its attributes, struggles or even achievements, it simply states that “whatever you are meant to do, do it now”. Clarifying, isn’t it? That April day in 2019 I made a decision to never let anyone or anything else dictate what I valued or saw as “important” - rather I have an ability to show others a bigger picture they might not have seen otherwise. I have chosen to invest my personal energies since in things that will last & have a wider impact - my family & children, small businesses struggling in the pandemic, and the wonderful community I have fostered through my personal brand.

Over the last year my personal blog (Noelle Weigel Style) evolved into something else entirely different from your standard fashion blog - a place to highlight and discuss the very real challenges that exist in the modern fashion industry, and provide some context for their evolution, with an emphasis on the human stories therein. An evolution of my platform & skills that feels like the best of me, an opportunity to use my voice, insight, and empathy for the greater good - to highlight the lives, struggles, and victories of others, both past & present. I believe this conversation is vitally important to the public discourse, because culture only matters in the context of humanity. I will endeavor to bring to your attention the voices and opinions of others more experienced than myself, and will expose you to my own perspectives on the role culture plays in our lives. Ultimately, my goal is to remain a bastion for the simple truth that there is goodness in this world and in each other, and each of us have a role to play in it’s creation & defense. If we do not care, who will?

Editor at Large is the title that is given to those whose unique perspective can offer insight or interest to a given subject. I have boldly claimed it for my Substack title, not because I think I am terribly interesting or important, but because I think the conversations I can curate on this platform, are. The topics we will discuss here are so much bigger than myself, but rather explore the fabric of culture and what it means to be be human in the context of cultural history. In order to employ myself however, I have had to go in search of a platform that sees the written word of any individual that writes, as intrinsically worthy of compensation from those that enjoy it - in other words, a writer deserves to be paid for his/her work. What centuries of brilliant penniless writers would have given for that! Substack is single-handedly revolutionizing the value of the written word, and should be applauded for it. I will be continuing to cover topics like the cost of consumerism or the historical foundations for the clothes we wear, to the real world people trying to preserve our heritage industries today and so much more. I hope you will consider joining me here on Substack, and signing up to support my work - for $5 a month (less than a Starbucks coffee!) you will gain full access to all of my writing. This support will enable me to keep writing even more, and invite unique guests to Editor at Large that might not otherwise be heard on this platform.

Thank you very much for your support and for the pledge of faith in what I am trying to create here at Editor at Large. See you soon in your inboxes!