Gladys Lai // NEXT WAVE
Name: Gladys Lai
Handle: @gladys__lai
Job Title: Head of Brand
Workplace: Vogue Australia
Location: Sydney, Australia
What career lesson did you have to learn the hard way that juniors would benefit from hearing earlier?
At some point, you will have to be difficult. We all have the urge to fawn or flee when it’s your first job. You’re so concerned with proving that you’re excellent that you, one, overexert yourself at the expense of your mind and body, and two, are afraid to disagree with anything. But life will continue to place you in uncomfortable positions until you choose, for the first time, to fight. Being good at your work also means understanding what is not going well. Point out the leak. Ask for help. Offer an alternative point of view. Stand up for what you believe in. Learn how to treasure integrity in yourself and others. Being a good employee is often different to being a good person.
What’s something about working in fashion that sounds glamorous online but feels completely different once you’re actually inside the room?
Fashion promises you access, which has a glamorous face. If you like celebrities and beauty samples and clothes and party invites, you will get all of that. But substance? You find it in the work, and work is unglamorous by nature. Working in this industry means long days and long nights. Everything is urgent, even when it isn’t. No-one is paid well but everyone’s in The Row. There is very little diversity, and some are very committed to making sure it stays that way. If you do not have a certain level of privilege, staying inside the room is just as difficult as entering it. So what keeps me here is the work—not my day-to-day tasks specifically, but a commitment to bettering myself and the industry. How can I make sure more people are seen and heard? How can I locate meaning? What is important about imagination? The glamour might draw you into fashion initially, but dedicating yourself to the work requires an understanding of beauty, which is a different thing entirely.
At Vogue, what makes someone stand out beyond just having “good taste”?
Taste goes nowhere without the courage to act on it or the curiosity to question it. Fashion can be a superficial industry, in the sense that so many people are invested in the way things look and seem. How can I signal ‘taste’? How can I place myself in proximity to people with ‘taste’? How do I acquire ‘taste’? The more I hear about taste, the less I am convinced of its importance. Taste is an invention. It is a trickle-down construct that implies there is a right or wrong interest or way of dressing. When it is bandied about as social currency, it encourages people to adopt habits or opinions that have not come to them naturally. What feels more compelling to me is the idea of personal taste, of discovering or reaching a point of view that is yours, that you hold unapologetically. How do you sit or take your coffee? Why do you keep coming back to that skirt? What draws you to this piece of art? Understanding why you like what you like requires humility but also the bravery to stand by it. That’s something that will make you stand out anywhere.
In an industry where everyone references each other, how do you build an original perspective?
You build an original perspective by being an original person, which basically means that you should invest in interests outside of your industry. Everything you love feeds into the person that you are, so when you bring that person to your work, that love feeds into the way you create and communicate and solve problems. A non-exhaustive list of things I do in my spare time include: learning languages, boxing, drawing, painting, running, reading, hiking, teaching, watching poker tournaments and history documentaries, doing escape rooms. All of that is relevant to what I do at work, or rather, how I see my work and the world it exists in. If all of my time was dedicated to fashion or fashion-adjacent disciplines, I would understand fashion in one way.
Opening yourself up to other methods of understanding allows you to see what you love in an infinite number of ways. That’s originality.
