NEW & (possibly, hopefully, maybe) IMPROVED
Welcome to Life Unstyled, the NEW newsletter and podcast by me, designer and interiors author Emily Henson. By moving over most of my writing (and adding personal video chats and podcasts) here to Substack I hope to write, podcast and connect more frequently and in a more meaningful way than on other social media platforms - about interiors, style, emotions, ambition, failures, successes and all of life with its messes and imperfections.
When I started my original blog - also called Life Unstyled - in 2009, it was as a reaction to the unattainable perfection of homes I was seeing in magazines at that time. This was before social media as we now know it - there wasn’t even Instagram yet with its perfectly curated images and grids - and I was already sick of all the perfection! (Little did I know how much worse it would become with the advent of social media). I was particularly aware of the disparity between the images in magazines and how people really live because I was working as a stylist and helping to create some of those impossibly perfect images! I would be styling shoots for brands so that they could sell products, knowing full well that these images didn’t represent anything close to real life and it drove me crazy. Everything was too perfect and I knew that it made people feel bad about their own less than perfect homes and lives when they looked at those pictures. So that’s why I started the old blog. To show a bit of reality in interiors in the hope that people would feel better about themselves. I was doing #INSTASHAM before it was a thing, showing my home styled for a magazine and then in its natural messy state. And I loved writing that blog. Although I never wrote as frequently as I would’ve liked because it took SO MUCH TIME! I felt like I couldn’t just write little bits here and there - every post felt like it had to have weight and meaning and great images and all of that is very time consuming. I’m hoping this newsletter can be a bit more relaxed and impromptu.
With the success of Life Unstyled the blog (and also of my two previous books) I was later offered a publishing deal to write an interiors book by the same name. In the introduction to the book Life Unstyled I say this about the state of magazines in the 2000’s: “It was all fiction and fantasy - interiors in a flawless and frankly unattainable state, intended to inspire but also setting impossibly high standards of perfection”. I go on to say “My aim for Life Unstyled the blog and now this book (and now this Substack!) was to rebel against those spotless, clutter-free interiors and instead talk about real homes, the kind so many of us live in”. Yes I just quoted myself, and yes it felt a bit weird, but sometimes I look back at things I wrote and go, hmm that’s not bad actually! I loved that book and I’m still so proud of it.
The world has moved on a bit since the early days of interiors blogging. The veil has finally lifted! (I just had to google if that’s the correct phrase for what I mean and I’m not 100% convinced it is, but I think you get the picture). On Instagram and Tiktok we now get to see inside not just our friends homes but the homes of celebrities as they cook their dinner or play with their pets or kids. It used to be that all celebrities would share was an incredibly tidy, styled shot of their luxurious home in a glossy magazine, but now we see them in their pj’s with bedhead, making pancakes. It’s crazy! But also sometimes great. Yes, many of them may have fabulous homes but often they also have dishes in the sink or piles of stuff on the kitchen island or pet food bowls on the floor and - god forbid - plastic bottles of dish soap that haven’t been decanted into elegant glass containers. We get to have a collective “celebrities, they’re just like us!” moment. (Unless we’re talking about Kim and Kanye’s old house which let’s be honest, looked like a mausoleum).
For this new platform I thought about changing the name from Life Unstyled to something fresh and catchy or even just using my name, but aside from the fact that I literally couldn’t come up with a single decent idea, it still feels relevant. Because what I want to do moving forward is share more of the life bit, woven of course within posts about creativity and interiors and art and beauty and styling and books. It’s what I’ve been doing for years on Instagram and I love the community I’ve built on there, but Instagram itself has changed so much and I’m done with trying to figure out how to ‘win’ the algorithm so that people actually see what I share. Over the past few years I’ve wanted to start a podcast, make more videos, talk about more personal things, share interiors processes, be a bit silly, be a bit serious, talk about my books and other people’s books, share my illustrations, share my frustrations and fears…But lately on Instagram it feels like I’m talking into the wind and at the same time always hoping I get likes and views. When all I really want is to connect. And now I can do all of that in one place, right here!
So, long story long, if you also want to connect in a human way then please subscribe and get ready for what is sure to be a bit of everything - from useful interiors tips to advice on how to write a book to how I plan a shoot to what scares me and what makes me tick. There will be a mix of posts for unpaid and paid subscribers, the exact balance is yet to be decided, so if you see posts that intrigue you but you can’t access, do consider becoming a paid member (the monthly fee is no more than a pricey coffee from a bougie London bakery). I never did ads or paid posts on my old blog or Instagram because it didn’t feel right for me, but I am more than comfortable charging a small fee to share what is actually a pretty broad portfolio of experience with you in this newsletter. Most of all, I hope you feel good about what I share here and feel like you’ve had an actual experience with a real human being - me!