Culture and Creative Spaces with Briony Wright
This month, we partnered with our friends at Homeroom, Sophie Barker and Annie Carroll to curate our monthly newsletter series Something Else. We asked Sophie and Annie to interview someone they admired. Thats where Briony comes in. Briony is an icon of Melbourne’s publishing scene with a Rolodex like nobody else in the country. As the ultimate creative – who once helmed the editorial departments at Vice Australia and i-D – Briony channels her instinct for culture into work for clients like the NGV, Chanel and Mercedes. Oh, and she has her own floristry business, Crushes Flowers. As one of our earliest mentors to homeroom, we knew we had to sit down with Briony to pick her brain on all things culture, fashion and career evolution.
BRIONY, YOU SEEM LIKE SOMEONE WHO HAS ALWAYS BEEN THE ULTIMATE COOL GIRL. WHAT WERE YOU LIKE IN HIGH SCHOOL? DID YOU KNOW WHAT YOU WANTED TO DO, CAREER-WISE, BACK THEN? PAINT US A PICTURE OF YOU AT 17 (INCLUDING WHAT YOU WERE WEARING).
Ha, thank you. At 17, I was really into English and literature and loved reading and watching movies – it’s no shocker that I always had a classic on the go. I was also really into discovering new music and would spend most weekends looking for rare records at places like Missing Link, Au Go Go and Gaslight in the city (which was basically a ghost town those days) or sneaking in to see friends’ bands in Richmond or to dance at indie clubs for a few hours before catching the last train home. I was always obsessed with the uniforms of different subcultures - the ideas, attitudes, community and history they represented. In old pictures I poured over, 70s British punks looked amazing and seemed like they were having a ball. I think I romanticised the idea of finding my people in the same way.
In my late teens, I meandered through light odes to goth, grunge and rave. At the same time I always followed what the luxury fashion houses were doing, ultimately turning up to dance parties in things like vintage Prada skirts, silver X-Girl t-shirts and my favourite Issey bomber. It was more second-hand Marc Jacobs than Ministry of Style.
I didn’t have any idea what I ultimately wanted to do, but during my 3 years of Arts at Uni I was writing music reviews for In Press Magazine and short fashion features for titles like CAT Magazine and loved the idea of capturing the culture like they did in magazines I read, like The Face.
YOU BROUGHT I-D AND VICE TO AUSTRALIA AS EDITOR OF BOTH PUBLICATIONS WHICH MUST HAVE GIVEN YOU THE FRONT-ROW SEAT TO EMERGING FASHION AND CULTURE IN THIS COUNTRY. CAN YOU TELL US WHAT THIS EXPERIENCE WAS LIKE?
It was incredible. I loved that it was our job, and our responsibility, to find and celebrate what we considered the best new music, fashion and art in Australia and New Zealand. We hired great music and fashion editors to help navigate this and over the years they really became like family. We were drawn to talent on the outskirts - usually creatives making genius moments on small budgets. We also loved watching many of these artists, musicians or designers become bigger and seeing their careers evolve globally. There was no social media to speak of so we were out at gigs, fashion shows, galleries and parties all the time. We wrote about and photographed so many upcoming bands and also had them play our parties or feature in our branded work. I remember getting Cut Copy to play one of their early shows at a Vice party, which was epic. Also having to convince the manager of a Sydney venue to let a very fresh Tame Impala in (they weren’t quite 18 yet), to play the party we’d been organising for the past month. For our fifteenth birthday in 2018, I got Charli XCX to DJ, which was awesome. The parties always had free entry and drinks, so it was difficult to manage numbers and always felt a bit frenzied, which was possibly part of their appeal. We wrote features on so many amazing emerging designers and brands and loved being able to give a small platform to local talent who were doing everything they could to make it in a really difficult industry. Navigating the balance between creative and commercial is tricky in Australia and being able to shine a light on talent was something we took really seriously.
YOU’VE PRODUCED SOME ICONIC MEDIA MOMENTS IN RECENT YEARS. THE JANNIK SINNER FEATURE FOR INTERVIEW MAGAZINE SPRINGS TO MIND. HOW DID THAT COME ABOUT?
My partner Myki Slonim and I had been running Vice in Australia for almost seventeen years when we made the decision to move our family to Singapore to help strengthen ties in countries across Asia Pacific where so much great stuff was emerging. Two months after moving, before we’d even found our feet, Covid came along and I was homeschooling my young kids in an underground apartment as the publishing industry went into freefall. When we came back to Australia, everything had changed and I started doing freelance Creative Production, working on jobs as they came to me. I worked on jobs for NGV, Wrangler, Chanel, Audi, lots of music shoots and many others. Meeting Jannik was awesome, he was adorable and I’m so glad he’s killing it.
THERE’S A BIT OF A STICKY ASSUMPTION IN OUR CULTURE THAT WE HAVE TO STICK TO OUR CHOSEN CAREER PATH, ESPECIALLY THE OLDER WE GET. WHAT MOTIVATED YOU TO START CRUSHES AT THIS STAGE IN YOUR CAREER, WHEN YOU’RE SEEMINGLY AT THE HEIGHT OF YOUR POWER IN THE WORLD OF MEDIA AND CREATIVE PRODUCING?
It’s true, it feels counterintuitive to change career paths, especially if there’s quiet resistance from those more established in the field. I think generally though, communities are really supportive if you’ve chosen something that makes you happy and that you’re willing to work hard at and be generous with. Imposter syndrome is so real, particularly when you’re trying something new. That said, it’s so widely accepted now that people, particularly in the creative space, can start a brand new venture. Everyday there are new magazines through Substack, cute labels, run clubs, skin care lines, event businesses...if you can dream it, you can do it. It’s exciting and overwhelming. Paradoxically, social media, the very thing that makes this all possible, also ensures that you’re destined to torture yourself daily via endless comparison.
I arrived at a point where I felt like the creative part was missing from my creative production. I liked the idea of a return to study so enrolled in a Floristry course at the Polytechnic. I loved learning all the traditional techniques of floristry. I got a cute little studio on Gertrude street and before I knew it, I was being asked by friends and local businesses to do their flowers and I just loved it. It’s such a beautiful, amazing medium with so many applications. I still do all my creative production work but now I also have this truly creative element that I can keep honing and evolving, which is perfect.
WHAT WOULD YOU TELL OTHER PEOPLE WHO ARE CONTEMPLATING TAKING A RISK IN THEIR CAREER?
It’s never too late to pursue new passions or create meaningful change. There may be financial implications that make it tricky, but even if it means slowly making the change, finding the thing that gives you purpose and makes you happy has to be the goal.
BRIONY, YOU SEEM LIKE SOMEONE WHO HAS ALWAYS BEEN THE ULTIMATE COOL GIRL. WHAT WERE YOU LIKE IN HIGH SCHOOL? DID YOU KNOW WHAT YOU WANTED TO DO, CAREER-WISE, BACK THEN? PAINT US A PICTURE OF YOU AT 17 (INCLUDING WHAT YOU WERE WEARING).
Ha, thank you. At 17, I was really into English and literature and loved reading and watching movies – it’s no shocker that I always had a classic on the go. I was also really into discovering new music and would spend most weekends looking for rare records at places like Missing Link, Au Go Go and Gaslight in the city (which was basically a ghost town those days) or sneaking in to see friends’ bands in Richmond or to dance at indie clubs for a few hours before catching the last train home. I was always obsessed with the uniforms of different subcultures - the ideas, attitudes, community and history they represented. In old pictures I poured over, 70s British punks looked amazing and seemed like they were having a ball. I think I romanticised the idea of finding my people in the same way.
In my late teens, I meandered through light odes to goth, grunge and rave. At the same time I always followed what the luxury fashion houses were doing, ultimately turning up to dance parties in things like vintage Prada skirts, silver X-Girl t-shirts and my favourite Issey bomber. It was more second-hand Marc Jacobs than Ministry of Style.
I didn’t have any idea what I ultimately wanted to do, but during my 3 years of Arts at Uni I was writing music reviews for In Press Magazine and short fashion features for titles like CAT Magazine and loved the idea of capturing the culture like they did in magazines I read, like The Face.
