Approximately two months ago, I was reading the last pages of a book that had changed the direction of my life.

The way I was holding on to that book... I did not want to let go of it.

It felt as if I did not even want to finish it, and was desperately trying to leave a few more pages to read, to keep the experience going a little longer.

The book had become a friend.

You know how we live — we wake up, we scroll, we do all monotonous things daily life is requiring us to do — and at a certain point we do not realize how much we have disconnected from ourselves.

We lose our core identities, sometimes we forget what drives us in this journey called life, and only when we have reached the bottom, do we somehow want to remember what made us look up to the sky for a moment and happily say that you love your life.

This happened to me, too. But I began reading Amy Odell’s biography of Anna Wintour in May at a moment when I was trying to find my way back to journalism.

At the time when I was reading it, I thought I was reinventing, but later I discovered that I was actually returning.

The journalist I thought I had lost

I started out as a television journalist at nineteen.

After getting accepted into an internship program at one of the largest television companies in Bulgaria, I spent a year and a half working there and learning the profession. I became a reporter, wrote for the lifestyle website of the media company, and hosted of my video podcast there.

I interviewed celebrities, did stories for the television programmes and I felt fulfilled. I knew that every day I was waking up to a day full of opportunities and I especially enjoyed the unpredictability of the work.

Every day contained the possibility of something I could not have planned. I felt very much alive.

What persisted during all of that time, however, was the fact that I was never hired on a contract, and I was not making any money from what I was doing.

In September, 2022, I quit.

I had just returned to television after a short media program in Istanbul, and I knew I wanted more. I returned with a pocketful of ideas and I immediately started working again.

However, I returned to a lot of editorial changes within the infrastructure of the company, disagreements and the same unresolved question of my employment. I was also preparing the new season of my podcast, and somehow I was still not working on a contract.

The head of the news department invited me to visit his office so we can properly discuss the situation. And he told me not to wait at the door, but to come straight in.

I did.

Numerous times.

He was always talking on the phone and I do not blame him for being busy. After a week of attempting to find the right moment though, I still had no answer.

On what became my last day in television, I had an argument with one of the news anchors, who humiliated me publicly in the newsroom over something as ridiculous as the fact that I had greeted her twice that day.

My ego was hurt and I decided to speak to the head of news one last time.

I went to his office. Knocked. Entered.

He was talking on the phone again and made that gesture, implying that we would speak later.

I took my bag, descended the staircase one last time, and decided that this was my last day in television.

On the way out, I saw that news anchor I had argued with earlier, greeted her thrice, and left.

Then I went to the hairdresser.

Over the course of the following days, I was contemplating the decision to return and continue working like that. After all, I was still a student, living with my family, so what would I need money for either way.

Silly me.

I decided to wait a little, so my thoughts could settle. No one called.

Only the future editor-in-chief of the television’s lifestyle website asked me to write a piece about the jewellery Kate Middleton might inherit after the passing of Queen Elizabeth II.

I was deeply interested in the Royal Family so I decided to write the story. That was my final piece for television.

Nobody called me to ask what was happening with the podcast. I cancelled the interviews I had arranged, explained to the guests that there were some changes, and told them we would keep in touch.

And time stood still.

What was going to happen? Where was the newsroom? The studio? My guests?

Television had become the infrastructure of my life, so without it, I felt lost.

Writing without a newsroom

I began writing about celebrities on Medium in English.

I remember thinking I would build an international portfolio, reach readers abroad and eventually use the work to find opportunities outside Bulgaria.

Some of the articles were very successful, reaching celebrities’ publicists, producers, some of the articles even appeared prominently in Google search results.

The absence of television’s scaffolding was unfortunately obvious despite the progress I was making.

I did not have deadlines, nor editors waiting for a story. I was working for myself, and the most painful thing was that I stopped doing interviews.

I had stopped believing anyone would agree to speak with me now that I was no longer working in television.

I stopped believing I was a journalist.

And continued writing.

At the same time, my mother was continuously making me find a job, so in order to save myself from working in Starbucks, for instance, I decided to begin offering private English and Hebrew lessons.

I would work from home, teach online, make money, and continue writing, I thought.

Finding students turned out to be far from easy, but gradually, they came. Sadly, my writing was suffering from that tremendously. In order to adjust to my students’ needs I scattered lessons at deadly time blocks, which made my writing blocks quite disorganized.

Family responsibilities and health problems added further interruptions. Time was passing, I was still in Bulgaria, teaching, writing in whatever time and emotional space was left, feeling unhappy and dissatisfied.

I was still writing occasionally, but I was no longer building the professional life I had imagined.

And I wanted to leave Bulgaria.

A different life in Istanbul

I came to Istanbul in September 2024 to look for apartments. The market was hectic and I could not find a house, but I found my first boyfriend instead.

But that is another story of coming out, heartbreak, relocation, and other encounters which deserve their own attention.

I liked Istanbul. I felt liberated and alive, and nothing could stop me from moving here, so the safest possible route to stay permanently in Turkey was to become a student. I applied to university, received a scholarship, and found a way to remain here.

I found an apartment that I named The Museum of Meltdowns later. Only the four walls of my studio apartment know how many tears have been shed between them.

I was studying, teaching to pay my rent, navigating heartbreak and trying to establish a life of my own. Family arguments continued, and the emotional space available for writing became smaller and smaller.

Do you notice what is missing?

Journalism.

I kept blaming my heavy schedule for the fact that I had no time to write, that I had to continue teaching to earn money, so I could pay my rent, that I had to study.

And the desire to write was still there. But the actual writing was not happening. Interviews were not happening either.

There were always other things demanding immediate attention.

Finding my way back

What changed that outcome, however, was starting therapy in February this year. I had just gone through another cycle of family arguments, caused by a situationship with a friend of mine. Not only was I suffering from the fact that he left Istanbul for an undefined period of time, but I also had to defend my decisions to my family.

I knew I could no longer continue like that so I booked my first therapy appointment with one of my role models in journalism. I am so thrilled that my therapist is a renowned journalist and a psychologist. She just understands me in ways no one else does.

My therapist always tells me I learn very fast and apply that knowledge to my life very fast as well. Once we defined what the actual problems were and gave myself enough space in which I could breathe and exist, I found I needed to start again.

So I published a new article on Medium. Then the next week another one. They were both personal - the first was the story behind the last situationship and the second was a restart of a series dedicated to Sex and the City.

Then I decided, I needed to start writing about celebrities and wrote about Christina Aguilera.

Somehow, I started returning to my core identity of a journalist that was buried under years of trauma, heartbreak, survival mode, and teaching.

Around that time, I went to Bulgaria for a few days where I saw The Devil Wears Prada 2 at the cinema, and there is a scene in which Miranda Priestly turns to Andy and says:

“God, I love working.”

And something in me clicked.

I love working, too.

I missed journalism so much, I missed the creative world tremendously, missed interviewing people, missed telling stories, working with images, ideas.

I could not wait to return to Istanbul and find a way to make more room for it.

“Of course she was wearing the sunglasses”

A few days later, I was back, and one day in May, I was sitting in the library at AKM, , the Atatürk Cultural Center, which currently functions as The Wonder Mag’s headquarters.

I knew Miranda Priestly’s character is partly built on Anna Wintour, I knew Anna was the editor-in-chief of Vogue until last year, so I opened Vogue’s website and subscribed for a year.

Then I searched the library catalogue for Vogue, looking for archival issues or books about Vogue that might help me understand how a magazine has survived over a century, continues to be innovative, and challenges the status quo.

However, while I was scrolling through the results, I found something much more interesting.

Anna Wintour was staring at me from the cover of Amy Odell’s biography, wearing her iconic Chanel sunglasses.

I took the call number and started browsing the shelves. I found Anna on the third floor and took the book. When I opened it, the first sentence I read in the introduction was:

“Of course she was wearing the sunglasses.”

So was I.

I always wear mine.

I began reading the description of what happens to be the day following Donald Trump’s first election as president, and the reactions it had caused within Vogue’s ranks and the all-staff meeting that followed.

What got my attention, however, was:

“Anna started the day as usual. She rose by 5:00 a.m., exercised at 5:30 or 6:00 (depending on whether she played her twice weekly tennis or worked out with her trainer), sat for thirty minutes for professional hair and makeup, and was then chauffered to her office at 1 World Trade Center, where her three assistants and her usual breakfast — a whole-milk latte and a blueberry muffin from Starbucks, which would mostly go uneaten — were waiting for her.”

What really got my attention was how much structure there was in Anna’s days and I felt tempted to test that out, too.

The morning after

The following morning, I rose at 5 a.m. It was a shock to my body, but I knew I wanted to test whether a more deliberate routine could give me the space I had been missing. I proceeded with day, and returned to “Anna”.

I began building my own 5 a.m. morning routine, consisting of doing yoga after waking up, having breakfast while listening to Mel Robbins’ podcast or The Run-Through with Vogue, going to AKM, studying Turkish, reading Vogue, reading “Anna”.

There was a desk, a book, and a plan for each day.

A book suddenly turned into my companion, my friend, a safe place I returned to daily.

Anna’s routine, her decisiveness, her sharp thinking and way of communicating her ideas (she’ll probably faint if she sees the length of this essay) all forced me to start fighting for what I believe in. To find a purpose, to define it, to continue performing.

I did not want to become Anna Wintour. I wanted to understand what it might mean to take my own work seriously enough to build a life around it.

From Medium to The Wonder Mag

One of the decisions that followed was to move my writing from Medium to Substack.

I did not enjoy Medium’s architecture anymore, and I desired to have something more branded, more me. I knew about Substack, I was seeing it everywhere more often, and I eventually decided to migrate. I needed to build something more capable of holding the different subjects and formats I wanted to explore.

That is how The Wonder Mag was born.

The more important change, however, was that I was even thinking about myself in a different way.

While reading Anna Wintour’s biography, I realized I did not want to write occasional articles anymore. I wanted to build a magazine. I wanted interviews, features, essays, video, recognizable point of view.

I wanted the work to have a structure that could support it and I wanted to stop waiting for somebody else to give me permission to be a journalist.

When I began considering interviewing again, I was frightened, and my decision to actually start doing it again, I largely attribute to my therapist. Only the two of us know how insecure I was.

“Who would agree?” - I asked my therapist.

“You are an international media, Ivan. You have actual television experience, you know languages, you have an editorial vision. Of course they would agree.” - she calmly reminded me.

And yet, I was spiralling…

Sending the first interview pitch to somebody was terrifying. What do I say to them, how do I present myself, where am I publishing them? The Wonder Mag?

I created English and Bulgarian YouTube channels to accompany the publication and started approaching potential guests with concrete ideas.

I was surprised to see that when I presented myself calmly, as a journalist, as a writer, as someone with actual experience, and a current appealing idea, people began saying yes.

Some declined for practical reasons. Others remained in contact. Some agreed to interviews that have since become part of The Wonder Mag.

The newsroom began to exist, but this time, I was building it by myself.

Returning, not reversing

Once I started producing and The Wonder Mag began to take shape, I felt as if I was reinventing my journalistic identity.

I was changing my routines, building a publication, returning to interviews and trying to create a different professional life. I was still teaching, and I am still teaching, but there is balance. There are priorities.

In August, I began writing this piece in the theme of The Summer of Reinvention, but in the light of the events that were taking place in my life, I realized I was not reinventing, but returning.

For me, the key difference was that I was not merely reinventing myself as a journalist, I was bringing the intervening years with me, while returning to my actual calling.

The teaching. The migration. The relationships. The disappointments. The experience of trying to build a life without the professional infrastructure I had once depended on.

None of it had made me the same person I was at nineteen.

Even one of my interviewees for The Summer of Reinvention, who is a therapist and voice image coach, made a remark on the fact that my gaze seemed different now.

He knew me from my days in television. He remembered my eyes wandering a lot, chasing every beautiful thing around me.

Today, he said, the curiosity is still there, but there was more certainty in the way I looked — as though I knew what I was looking for.

What he said, embodies the return. It is a return to my roots, to my identity. Even to my mother tongue, as I am doing a lot of the interviews in Bulgarian.

I am returning to journalism as the person I have become.

The last pages

When I finished Anna in July, I cried. The ugly cry.

I could not believe that the book carried me through my own return to journalism, helped me believe in myself and become more confident.

While reading, I rebuilt my routines, and by the time I finished the book, The Wonder Mag existed.

The book had not done all of that for me.

My therapist is beside me each week and she initially helped me create space for change.

Other people had encouraged me, supported me and agreed to become part of the publication.

But Anna arrived at the exact moment when I needed a model of what an editorial life could look and feel like. It helped me understand that structure was of utmost importance and it reminded me I had not lost the part of myself that loved journalism.

So thank you, Amy Odell, for writing the book.

Thank you, Anna Wintour, for the example and for continuing to create the most special and vivid moments in fashion, for preserving fashion and the legacy of designers.

Thank you, Miranda Priestly, for reminding me that I love our creative world.

And thank you to my therapist, who helped me begin making the decisions that allowed the work to return.

And I am thankful to myself for letting myself believe I have so much more to say.

I am still teaching. Still building.

The Wonder Mag is still very young, still becoming, but it is already a real editorial home.

But I know what I am returning to. And I know that the person returning is not the same as the one who left.

He is sharper now. Clearer. Enriched. Bruised in some places.

But unmistakably Ivan.

Founder & Editor-in-Chief of The Wonder Mag.

Read next: THE RETURN | September’s Editor’s Letter:

There are versions of ourselves that belong to particular places. One exists at home. Another emerges at work. Another one appears around old friends, and sometimes an entirely different one is born after we move somewhere nobody knows us.

Languages can produce their own versions, too.

I have become increasingly aware of this since moving to Istanbul. Bulgarian belongs to one part of my life, while English seems to unlock another. Turkish is still being constructed, whereas Spanish and Hebrew carry other associations entirely.

At one point during my conversation with voice and public-speaking coach Evan Holovatskyi, I described it as having five people living inside me.

He understood me immediately.

Holovatskyi has lived across Ukraine, the United States, Bulgaria and the United Kingdom. Moving between countries, he told me, has changed not just the way he communicates with others but also his idea of who he can be.

“It definitely changes me,” he said of migration, adding that a new country can allow us to create new ways of communicating and behaving while remaining ourselves.

I guess, that is one of the quietest freedoms of leaving somewhere — nobody knows your history yet.

You can arrive without the expectations of schoolmates, relatives, colleagues or an older version of yourself watching from across the room. As Holovatskyi puts it, when nobody knows you, you may be brave enough to experiment with becoming something you had always wanted to be.

He compares it to trying on clothes.

A behavior catches your attention. You borrow it. You see how it feels. If it does not fit, you return it. If it does, perhaps it slowly becomes part of you.

That idea makes reinvention sound less like destruction and more like editing.

We do not necessarily kill an old self and manufacture a new one from nothing. We collect gestures, habits, expressions, languages and ways of occupying a room. Some survive. Others are discarded.

Eventually, the person speaking sounds slightly different.

Watch the full conversation with Evan Holovatskyi on YouTube.

The language changes. Does the person?

Holovatskyi does not believe that learning another language is merely an exercise in vocabulary.

We learn what he calls an interactional style: how people greet one another, how much warmth they show, how directly they speak, how they use their bodies, what kinds of behavior are rewarded or discouraged.

Over time, the social environment begins to shape the person using the language.

It explains why returning home after living abroad can occasionally feel like meeting a preserved version of yourself.

You walk back into an old environment carrying new habits and are suddenly confronted with the person who used to exist there.

People notice.

“You’re not the same. You’ve changed.”

Holovatskyi describes the process almost as the development of a new inner character: when we move somewhere new, we begin asking what kind of person we want to become there. Experience, relationships and language accumulate around that answer.

Some languages simply feel heavier though.

I told him that English often feels more liberating to me than Bulgarian. The same thought, confession or emotion can somehow become easier when expressed in a language that does not carry the full emotional architecture of childhood.

Holovatskyi believes a native language can give words greater emotional weight. Even something as apparently universal as I love you may feel different when spoken in the language in which we first learned what love, rejection or intimacy meant.

A foreign language can create a small amount of distance.

“It can feel a little like play,” he said.

That distance may be precisely what makes certain versions of ourselves easier to access.

What the voice reveals

Holovatskyi’s interest in voice began partly through dissatisfaction with his own. But the problem, he eventually realized, was not simply aesthetic.

He noticed that nervousness, insecurity and the feeling of being socially threatened could manifest physically: tension in the body, tension in the throat, a voice becoming thinner or higher.

Changing his voice therefore became inseparable from understanding why it behaved differently in certain situations.

Voice coaching can easily be misunderstood as learning to manufacture authority — lower this, slow that, remove the accent, sound more impressive.

Holovatskyi’ approaches it in a more complicated way.

There are times, he says, when we need to sound authoritative because the situation requires competence to be communicated clearly. There are others in which warmth matters more. A flexible voice should be capable of both.

The question becomes less:

How do I make my voice sound powerful?

and more:

Why does my voice stop allowing me to sound like myself?

Evan remembers being perceived as smaller, more vulnerable, even as somebody who needed to be taken care of. For a while, he wondered why other people treated him in ways he disliked. Eventually, he began examining what he himself was communicating.

In some situations, he realized, he was making himself smaller without intending to.

Voice, in that sense, becomes social information — we may verbally claim confidence while our delivery asks permission.

Holovatskyi gives a simple example: the upward inflection that turns a statement into something resembling a question.

Hello, I’m Evan? I’m a public-speaking trainer?

The words claim authority, but the sound seems to request approval.

That mismatch is where voice work becomes less cosmetic and more revealing.

The voices we borrow

But if we consciously change the way we sound, are we still being authentic?

Holovatskyi does not see imitation as the enemy.

Artists copy before developing their own style. Voice can work similarly. We may borrow a sound, a rhythm or a quality simply to discover what our instrument can do. Eventually, the borrowed elements either disappear or become integrated into something that feels like ours.

It is another version of trying on clothes.

And actually that is what many forms of reinvention are.

We imitate before we inhabit.

We perform confidence before confidence feels natural. We learn a new language before thinking in it. We enter a new country with behaviors that initially feel foreign, only to discover years later that they have become instinctive.

The performance is not necessarily evidence that something is false.

Sometimes it is rehearsal for the person we are becoming.

What do we keep?

Accents make this especially complicated.

They can be treated as problems to correct, but they can also become declarations of identity.

Holovatskyi sees accent as connected partly to integration: how strongly somebody wants to identify with a new linguistic environment may influence how much they consciously alter the way they speak. Others may choose to preserve more of their original sound because belonging does not require erasure.

That leaves us with an uncomfortable cultural question.

Who decided what intelligence sounds like? What does authority sound like?

Professionalism? Class? Belonging?

There are social conventions around all of them. Holovatskyi acknowledges that we engage in what he calls impression management, adjusting communication according to context.

But adapting and disappearing are not the same thing. The goal is not necessarily to eliminate every trace of where you came from, but to develop enough control that your voice becomes a choice rather than a reflex.

A voice is not a fixed object

Near the end of our conversation, Holovatskyi guided me through a short breathing and resonance exercise.

The effect was immediate.

My voice dropped into a more relaxed position. My speech slowed. I felt calmer.

“I don’t even want to move from here,” I told him. “It feels like a place you can inhabit for longer.”

Which made me wonder…

Maybe a voice is less like a sound we possess and more like a place we repeatedly return to.

It changes when the body changes. It changes when we become frightened. It changes when we fall in love, migrate, age, gain confidence, lose confidence, learn languages, change careers and enter rooms where different versions of ourselves are required.

Holovatskyi calls it a constant process.

The voice, he says, reflects the “finest particles of the human soul.” As we change physically and emotionally, it changes with us.

Five years had passed since the first time I interviewed him.

Both of us had moved through countries, professions and versions of ourselves since then, so before we ended, I asked him to complete one sentence.

A person finds their voice when…

He barely needed an explanation.

“When they meet themselves.”

Maybe that is why finding your voice is not really about finding one permanent sound, but becoming familiar enough with yourself that, through every language, country and version still to come, you can recognise the person speaking.

This conversation is part of The Wonder Mag’s Summer of Reinvention.

One of my favorite things about September is the strength we have acquired to start again. The summer is over. Voyages have mostly stopped.

And we return.

But what do we return to? And who do we return as?

We have spent the summer collecting rays of light that have darkened our skins, the tan lines will continue reminding us of the days by the sea. We have had encounters with people and places that have changed us more than we can imagine. We have had enough space to just unwind and enjoy the smaller things in life, and that has probably made us realize things about life that we had been too busy to locate.

And we are not the same.

But we still return.

We return to the cities where we live, to our homes, to our rituals and regimes, to our jobs, to our goals, to the ordinary parts of our lives we kept tucked under a beach towel.

Eventually, we realize that September has always felt more like a beginning of something than the end of a summer.

Psychologists describe the power of such moments as temporal landmarks. This is a distinct moment that evolves around particular dates - New Year’s Day, the first of the month, Mondays, or national holidays — they divide one period of our life from another and make a fresh start possible.

September, however, has always been associated with the beginning of school, and perhaps, it will continue to remind us of new beginnings. Add the first gusts of wind and cold air, the return of routines, the reopening of wardrobes and offices after August, and we have a sense that life is starting again.

The more I thought about The Return, the more I realized that returning is not as simple as going back.

It is impossible, time has already left its marks on us.

We have acquired new visions of life, while everything around us has continued without our presence - our office desk is still there, the emails are still knocking on our screens, begging to be let in and answered, the body we try to reconnect with has lived through everything that happened in between.

And when we return, we discover that we want an upgrade.

We want to know what to keep, what to leave behind, we want to define what happens when other people still expect the person we used to be, we need to decide what to leave behind.

All those questions began appearing as this issue was being built.

That is where September begins for The Wonder Mag.

Iglika Zhivkova’s life and work seem to revolve around the idea of putting things back in order. Our conversation asks why September makes so many of us want to reset our lives, and where is the line between care and control. And she clearly has the expertise to talk about that — through yoga, food, home, routine, lots of humour and eighteen years spent managing an entire apartment building, we are bringing stories that will help us realize the importance of discipline, solid regime, and what power cleanliness holds.

I will also speak with Yoga with Tanya, who also returned to a more visible public presence. There, we will have a different conversation — what makes us withdraw, what makes us come back, and how movement, spirituality and the body can become ways of returning to ourselves.

There is a more personal return in this issue, too.

I deliberately brought a piece from August to September - a personal essay on Amy Odell’s biography of Anna Wintour. This book accompanied me through my own return to journalism, so even though I returned to journalism reinvented, it is an actual return. I am not the journalist I was at 19, and returning to the career I was missing for so long, was not simply something that continued from where it had stopped. And I had to define the shape journalism would take in this new chapter of my life.

In the issue, The Return will move through Istanbul.

We are developing a feature around one of the most remarkable places of hospitality — Pera Palace — which has stood tall for over a century and holds stories from the past and remarkable public figures we keep returning to. As contemporary visitors, we are wondering: what are we actually looking for when we step into a hotel so vividly saturated with the memory of old Istanbul, the Orient Express and the people who passed through it before us.

Fashion is full of returns, too.

John Galliano begins a new chapter of his career with Zara and we will look beyond the collection itself. We will examine the archival pieces of Zara clothing that Galliano is expected to have transformed through his own unique vision — but in the light of recent events and the cancellation of his exhibition at the MET, we will also ask a difficult, but significant question. Who gets to return in fashion, and who decides when a comeback becomes rehabilitation, redemption or simply commerce?

Technology has created its own strange kinds of return.

In one story, we will look at how AI is being used to bring historical figures and old worlds back into the present. In another, we will ask what happens when fans can conjure the comeback of a pop star for themselves and create new music in the voice of an artist who is no longer actively under the spotlight.

Pop culture returns in its own literal ways, too.

Later in the month, we will discuss Madonna’s new era through the VMAs, where she is nominated in eleven categories. For an artist whose career now stretches beyond four decades, there is something compelling about returning to one of the stages on which her star was born. What does it mean to come back to the place where the world once watched you become a global star?

And considering September is also fashion’s symbolic beginning, I will finally sit to watch The September Issue, as I am building my own — a small act of editorial masochism, if ever there was one.

And, because no September issue should reveal everything on page one, a number of surprise interviews and major-name conversations will arrive throughout the month.

While our August issue was about reinvention, this is The Return.

It is not just about “going back”.

I wanted it to sit at the intersection of where past and present meet each other.

We do not necessarily have to resume all habits, relationships, or versions of ourselves, because it is familiar and we have come back.

This is the time we get to choose, select, return to what deserves us. We can walk back into an old room without agreeing to become the person who used to live there.

And sometimes we can reach the discovery that the most important part of returning is that we no longer want to stay.

So we change.

In September, The Wonder Mag returns to history, bodies, rituals, public lives, forgotten ambitions, places that preserve the past, and people confronting what the past still asks of them.

Sometimes the only way to understand how far we have come is to look again at where we started.

And then decide what, if anything, we would like to bring with us.

Welcome to The Return.

Ivan Ssavsski,
Founder & Editor-in-Chief of The Wonder Mag

Представете си следното — пристигате в чужда държава и се опитвате да говорите местния език, макар и развалено. Срещате обаче затруднение — човекът отсреща ви разбира, но вие него — не.

Той е свикнал да говори езика си, говори даже бързо. Изяжда букви, слага други ударения и не осъзнава, че има неща в собствения си глас, които е спрял да чува.

Иван Головатский разбира това почти веднага след идването си в България. Опитва се да разбере коя е спирката за Лъвов мост и пита шофьора на автобуса.

Чува нещо друго — “Уъов мост”. Свикнали сме с това, но той не е знаел за тази норма, с която се е сблъскал след пристигането си. Звукът “л” веднага привлича вниманието му. Едни го произнасяме по един начин, други по друг, а трети дори не осъзнават, че произнасят различно от книжовната норма. За човек, който идва отвън, разликата е очевидна - в Украйна звукът “л” се произнася по-меко. Но за нас, които сме израснали в среда, където тази разлика е нормална, тя често просто изчезва от слуха.

Точно това е любопитното в работата с гласа — понякога това, което другите чуват в нас веднага, за самите нас е станало напълно невидимо.

Пет години след първия ни разговор с Иван отново говорим за гласа, но и за начина, по който сме се научили да присъстваме пред другите.

Днес Иван живее в Англия, преподава и провежда обучения на международно ниво, а работата му се движи между публичното говорене, гласа, личния образ и поведенческия анализ. Ще разберете повече за това какво гласът казва за нас още преди да сме довършили изречението.

Гледайте целия разговор с Иван Головатский

Гледайте интервюто в YouTube

Когато гласът става по-малък

Има една ситуация, която вероятно е позната на повече хора, отколкото предполагаме — имаме нужда от нещо, трябва да поставим граница или просто да кажем ясно какво мислим — и точно тогава гласът ни сякаш става по-тих.

Иван свързва това не толкова с липса на правилна техника, колкото с навика да се адаптираме.

Когато човек дълго е мислил първо за нуждите на другите, за начина, по който ще изглежда в техните очи, или дори изпитва срам от факта, че самият той иска нещо, този вътрешен механизъм започва да се чува и отвън.

Промяната според него започва от наблюдението: как говориш, кога гърлото ти се стяга, кога по-твърдият тон на друг човек автоматично ти звучи като атака, кога се отказваш от собствената си позиция, преди някой изобщо да я е отхвърлил.

Понякога говорим тихо, защото сме се научили да бъдем по-малки.

Увереността не е викане

Вероятно затова толкова лесно бъркаме увереността с агресивността.

В публичното пространство човекът, който говори най-силно или прекъсва най-често, нерядко изглежда като човека с най-голям авторитет.

Иван тук прави важно разграничение — можеш да бъдеш напълно уверен в собствената си емоция — например в гнева си — без изобщо да бъдеш стабилен в себе си. Викът може да изглежда като сила, но под него може да стои безпомощност, страх или невъзможност да издържиш напрежението на конфликта.

Истинският авторитет според него е много по-свързан с компетентността, емоционалната регулация и способността да бъдеш директен, без да превръщаш другия в противник. В гласа това може да означава по-ясен, по-целенасочен звук, но не непременно по-шумен.

И тук гласът се превръща в карта на отношенията ни със света:

С кого говорим като равни?

Пред кого несъзнателно се смаляваме?

Пред кого започваме да звучим така, сякаш искаме разрешение дори за собственото си мнение?

„Какво ще кажат хората?“

Този въпрос неизбежно стига и до публичния образ.

Днес почти всеки, който има професия, бизнес, проект или кауза, в някакъв момент трябва да застане пред камера. Социалните мрежи превърнаха публичното говорене от умение за телевизионни водещи, политици и лектори в почти ежедневна част от професионалния живот.

Но заедно с това идва и страхът да бъдеш видян.

Иван отбелязва нещо утешително: когато качваш първото си видео, често си убеден, че всички ще го видят и ще те съдят. В действителност може почти никой да не го види. А единственият начин да разбереш как искаш да присъстваш пред аудитория е да публикуваш, после да публикуваш отново и постепенно да изградиш собствен начин на общуване.

В български контекст към това се добавя нещо много познато — „Какво ще кажат хората?“

Според Иван дълго време в България е било важно да покажеш, че си перфектен, че отговаряш на определен стандарт и че изглеждаш „правилно“ в очите на останалите. Именно това може да се превърне в пречка пред автентичността, защото започваш да строиш образа си изцяло според чуждото одобрение.

И изведнъж въпросът за гласа става въпрос и за това да си позволиш да бъдеш несъвършен пред публика.

Да качиш видеото.

Да кажеш какво мислиш.

Да не чакаш момент, в който вече няма да има какво да бъде критикувано.

Такъв момент така или иначе не идва.

Може да си добър — и никой да не разбере

Начинът, по който говорим, може да влияе върху това дали другите изобщо забелязват компетентността ни.

Иван дава пример с професионалната среда: хора с огромни знания и реален потенциал понякога остават по-малко видими от други, които имат по-малко технически умения, но умеят по-ясно да говорят за постигнатото, да изграждат връзка и да представят себе си уверено.

Това не означава, че говоренето е по-важно от професионалните способности, а че меките умения могат да определят дали твърдите ще бъдат видени.

Тази идея е неприятна именно защото е лесно да я отхвърлим като несправедлива.

„Но аз си върша работата добре.“

Вероятно е така.

Въпросът е дали човекът отсреща го разбира.

Гласът, дикцията, интонацията, начинът, по който изговаряш собствените си постижения — всичко това участва в първото впечатление много преди някой да е имал възможност да направи задълбочена оценка на способностите ти.

Иван говори и за диалектите като пример за това колко бързо работят подобни асоциации. Един различен говор може моментално да бъде регистриран като знак, че човекът е „от друго място“, а оттам могат да се задействат предположения за образование, интелигентност или социална принадлежност, които изобщо не е задължително да са верни.

Ако променя гласа си, още аз ли съм?

Ако гласът може да бъде трениран, ако дикцията може да стане по-ясна, ако човек може да започне да звучи по-стабилно, по-спокойно или по-авторитетно — кога промяната се превръща в преструвка?

По време на разговора Иван ме превежда през кратко упражнение за отпускане на гласа. И разликата действително се чува.

Гърлото се отпуска. Дишането се променя. Звукът става по-нисък и по-спокоен.

Но за него това не означава да изобретиш друга личност.

Той описва по-отпуснатия глас като начин да се доближиш до собствения си, когато излишното физическо и емоционално напрежение не го притиска. Ясната дикция и свободният звук могат да създадат различно впечатление, но промяната не е непременно маска.

Границата между образ и преструвка се корени в това дали новият звук ти позволява да кажеш по-ясно нещо, което вече е твое.

Преоткриването няма финална версия

Темата на август в The Wonder Mag е „Лятото на преоткриването“, а в разговора с Иван това понятие постепенно се освобождава от идеята за драматична трансформация.

Не се събуждаш една сутрин с окончателен характер, окончателен образ и окончателен глас.

Иван казва, че не вярва в крайна точка на преоткриването. По-опасното според него е да измислим идеализирана версия на себе си и насила да започнем да се напасваме към нея. По-важно е да останем способни да чуваме собствените си чувства и нужди и да експериментираме с онова, което действително работи за нас.

В края на разговора го моля да довърши едно изречение:

Човек намира гласа си, когато…

Отговорът е прост:

„Когато намери себе си. Когато знае кой е, какви са ценностите му и какво е важно за него, тогава можем да кажем, че е намерил и гласа си.“

Намирането на гласа не е вокална задача, която те кара да звучиш по-ниско, по-силно, книжовно или авторитетно.

Да намериш гласа си означава да стигнеш до момент, в който не се отказваш от собствената си позиция още преди някой друг да я е чул.

Да можеш да кажеш какво искаш, без да се смаляваш.

Да бъдеш видим, без предварително да се извиняваш за присъствието си.

И да разбереш, че човекът, който си позволява да заема място, не винаги е най-шумният човек в стаята, а този, който вече не се страхува да бъде чут.

Морис Фонсън ми казва, че ако преди две години някой му беше казал, че негова песен ще бъде част от албум на Мадона, вероятно е щял да помисли, че този човек е загубил разсъдъка си.

Две години по-късно това е вече факт.

Вероятно и на 19, като студент в Xavier University of Louisiana, подобна перспектива също е щяло да му се стори като “Мисията невъзможна.” Въпреки това той е знаел, че ще се занимава с музика, и за да стигне до тази своя цел изгражда рутина, която днес ни се струва невероятна.

Всеки негов уикенд тогава изглежда по следния начин — в петък тръгва от университета в Ню Орлиънс и лети до Ню Йорк, а в събота се озовава в някое задимено студио и започва да пише хукове за песни, които дори не знае дали ще бъдат издадени някога.

В неделя вечер отива във Village Underground, където слуша изпълнители на open mic, а в понеделник в пет сутринта вече е на полета обратно към Ню Орлиънс.

В осем трябва да е в часа си по химия.

Прави това две години.

Разказва ми, че е искал да изкарва малко пари от музиката, но всичко, което е печелил, обикновено стигало само за двупосочните полети и една нощувка в хотел.

За тези приключения е знаела само баба му, просто в случай, че нещо се случи с него.

Затова изразът “внезапен успех” е непонятен за него. За да стигне до големите имена като Дженифър Хъдсън, Леона Луис, Себастиан Ятра и Мадона, Морис е трябвало да измине много дълъг път в опити, движение и моменти, в които дори самият той не е бил сигурен дали някой ще го забележи.

Гледайте българската адаптация на разговора с Морис Фонсън:

Изминаването на този път обаче не е безпрепятствено.

Озовава се във връзка, която започва и приключва отново и отново. Тъгата и раздялата го съпровождат в начина, по който пише музика, и споделя, че понякога е разказвал историята на собствения си живот чрез друг артист.

Такъв пример е песента “Unlearn Me” — демо, писано за Леона Луис по време на една от тези раздяли.

“Песента беше моят начин да разплета тази връзка от душата си — оттам идва заглавието Unlearn Me: ‘отучи се от усмивката ми, отучи се от гласа ми, отучи се от любовта, която ти дадох’.“

За креативния си процес още разказва, че понякога когато другите артисти нямат конкретна посока, му дават обща представа какво се случва в живота им и понякога сесията за писане се превръща в терапия за тях. Той ги превежда през това, което искат да кажат за собствения си живот.

И точно оттук стигаме до предстоящия му проект Fun.

Предишните му проекти са били силно свързани с разбити сърца, анализиране, преживяване, опити да разбереш защо нещо не е проработило.

Сега Морис казва, че вече не обитава това състояние на духа:

“Всичко е по-леко. Сега съм на място, на което просто искам да се забавлявам. Предполагам, че това е преоткриването — себеоткриването на това кой съм в този момент, какво ме движи и какво ме кара да се чувствам добре. Бил съм тъжен достатъчно дълго. Това е новата версия — излекуваната версия на мен.”

И докато Морис се променя отвътре, професионалният му живот също расте. Тук идва Мадона. Той е работил с много големи артисти и преди това, но Confessions II се превръща в ново ниво за него:

“Ако преди две години ми беше казал, че ще имам песен в албум на Мадона, щях да ти кажа: „Ти си луд.“ Мисля, че все още съм по пътя на успеха и съм в един победен сезон. Искам този победен сезон да се превърне в победната глава на живота ми.”

А първият сингъл от предстоящото му EP е вече факт.

В “Sweet” Морис е далеч от човека, който анализира всяка разбита връзка до последната подробност":

“Забавна е. Искряща е. Аз съм забавен, лесен съм за общуване. Като едно мило плюшено мече съм. Малко съм увлечен. Хукът на песента е: „Защото си сладък, вземи всичките ми пари, вземи всичките ми пари.“ Все едно казвам: каквото искаш, бейби, просто го вземи.”

В рамките на нашето “Лятото на преоткриването” нямаше как да не го попитам какво означава самото преоткриване за него. Отговорът му е много по-интересен от идеята, че просто се превръщаме в някой напълно нов:

“Ние сме тези, които сме, заради местата, от които идваме. Можеш да смениш кожата си и да се преоткриеш като нов човек, но се превръщаш в този човек заради миналите преживявания, през които си преминал. Винаги има по нещо от старото ни аз, което идва с нас в бъдещето.”

Все още има неща, които го плашат. Едно от тях е времето:

“Имам чувството, че трябва да постигна определени неща точно сега и ако не се случат, светът ще свърши. Развивам се по отношение на това. Това е нещото, което ме плаши най-много. Но осъзнах, че онова, което е мое, ще бъде мое в момента, в който трябва да бъде мое.”

Именно тук историята на Морис става най-интересна, защото успехът не е дошъл след страха или раздялата. Всички тези неща продължават да съществуват едновременно.

И въпреки това успехът му вече е показал нещо друго: границите, които преди са изглеждали реални, може би не са такива.

Работата му с Мадона е едно от доказателствата.

„За мен всичко е възможно. Небето е границата. Няма артист, до когото да мисля, че не мога да стигна или за когото не мога да пиша. Няма граници.“

От 19-годишния студент, който пътува между Ню Орлиънс и Ню Йорк само за да бъде близо до музиката, до автора, който днес има Мадона сред кредитите си, Морис Фонсън все още не говори така, сякаш е стигнал крайната дестинация.

Той говори за Грами, за световно турне, за дебютен албум. Иска да бъде глобален артист.

И може би точно това е преоткриването.

Да станеш достатъчно свободен, че да не позволиш на старите страхове да определят границите на новата ти версия.

Гледайте: Целият разговор с Морис на английски в YouTube канала на The Wonder Mag.

Прочетете и: Becoming: Maurice Fonson — английският профил в The Wonder Mag.

When we write about icons on their birthdays, especially Madonna’s birthday, we most often use reinvention, provocation, longevity as a core theme of what we write about.

While it is undoubtedly true that Madonna has proven throughout the years her limitless ability to reinvent, challenge the status quo and break the norms, at 68, the image of an artist of such level is more complicated than changing constantly.

She has spent more than four decades examining which parts of herself still serve the woman she is becoming—and which ones no longer do.

During her career, Madonna’s artistry has been understood through movement in every aspect imaginable - new choreographies, new sounds, while refusing to repeat herself and stay the same.

The ones always true to Madonna stayed with her, followed the change and even turned her new chapters into the soundtrack of their own lives. There is almost no Madonna fiend who could not allocate a title of an album or a song of hers to a certain moment in their life path in which it had been released.

Others needed years to catch up with the change in her image and understand how revolutionary it had been.

And some never understood her at all.

Nevertheless, Madonna’s ability to reinvent became central to the way we perceive her, so when this year the release of Confessions II was confirmed, we were all curious to see how she had applied the idea of change to her upcoming music. We witnessed the first time Madonna did not need to showcase the reinvention she had undergone through a brand new look and mythology of an era.

The reinvention exists, the sound is brand new, she redefined the meaning of modern pop, and she did not repeat anything she has done in any ways, but this time she applied this exact reinvention to an era that already existed, returned to the past and how certain things had made her feel, returned us to the very beginning of her career with “Danceteria”, showed what grief could feel like through “Fragile”, reminded us that forgiveness is possible, and reintroduced us to the act of album-listening in an age of of fast beats and TikTok sounds.

She has not returned to being the woman she was in 2005, and why would she?

She has lived another twenty-one years through which she has loved, lost, raised children, changed, survived. Buried people she loved and people with whom love had become complicated. And we could have lost her, too, when she was battling sepsis.

She has watched culture imitate things she was once punished for. She has watched generations of women inherit freedoms for which she was once publicly humiliated.

And just like that, Confessions II taught us how to return to the past, remember, take certain lessons, then return to the present, live, dance, have fun, and continue building the future while carrying our experience, the things that truly shaped us, and never forget to actually live.

It shows how good she has become at reinvention—taking something from her own history and transforming it without getting trapped in the shape it had at first.

The woman who could never stand still

Madonna who arrived in New York at nineteen with 35 dollars in the pocket was already driven by the force of movement.

She was a dancer before the world knew her as a singer. She had a powerful mind that saw clubs both as community and opportunity, and she was looking for a place where she could become visible.

Once she was visible, the versions were increasing in numbers—lace, crucifixes, Like a Prayer, Catholicism.

In Erotica, she explored her sexuality which turned into the definition of the era.

There was Confessions on a Dance Floor, where movement was like religion and the nightclub turned into church.

Years later came Madame X which I consider one of Madonna’s greatest records. If Confessions II has now taken the first position for me, Madame X remains very close behind, but it was first for quite a long time.

What was so fascinating from that era was that Madonna presented not just one version, but many, and it was too hard for a 17-year-old gay boy from Bulgaria to ignore.

Madame X was a secret agent. A dancer. A professor. A housekeeper. A prisoner. A nun. A singer. A saint. A whore. A spy in the house of love.

The identities were numerous because Madonna herself had become too complicated to fit inside one. She does not destroy herself and start again.

The most genius thing she does is she takes the best from each era and accumulates, because every new Madonna contains traces of the previous ones:

Madame X still carries the rebel heart, which carries the complexities of the MDNA era, which expanded the world of Hard Candy, which made the dance floor sweeter and more bubbly. The said dance floor was the space where American Life could come to rest and confess, the same American Life that needed to shake the structure that Music established with pop, and Music was a little break from the shining Ray of Light, which had enough space to breathe after it took inspiration from Bedtime Stories.

The Bedtime Stories are what we say to each other after we have come down from the transforming force of Erotica, which complicated the Prayer. The same Prayer was too serious to be True Blue, and True Blue made us open our hearts after a touch that made Everybody and Madonna feel Like a Virgin.

You see, there is a certain thing from each album that Madonna has reinvented, transformed, and carried to the next, which gives each album a brand new persona and a different identity.

With Confessions II, however, she did not need to invent another Madame X in order to prove she could still transform.

The reinvention happened inside something we thought we already knew.

What happens when your own past becomes material?

A young artist has influences, but an artist who has lasted as long as Madonna has previous selves and an archive large enough to become another source of creativity.

Madonna herself recently said in Interview magazine that the years she spent revisiting her life—for the abandoned biopic, the Celebration Tour and now this album—have tuned her mind toward memory and the connections between different moments of her past. She has been clear that she is interested in that history not as somewhere to live permanently, but as something she can learn from and change.

That distinction is everything, because nostalgia would have been easy.

She could have called Stuart Price, recreated the exact synths, found another leotard, made something like Hung Up Again, given everybody the Madonna they insist they miss.

But she did not. Confessions II speaks the language of the original record without repeating its sentences.

Yes, Stuart Price is there. Yes, the songs blend into one another. Dance music is again treated as something larger than entertainment.

The woman telling the story is different though. The story is different too.

Songs such as “Good for the Soul” and “One Step Away”, “L.E.S. Girl”, do not sound to me like Madonna trying to reconstruct 2005.

They are a perfect example of how an artist has taken everything she has lived since 2005 and placed it inside a language her audience already understands.

She revised an old idea, took something canonised, risked changing it, and created one of the most sophisticated versions of reinvention.

She taught us not to settle for the version already approved

Madonna has had an enormous influence on the way I understand reinvention.

When I begin something new, my instinct is almost never to replicate what I have already done simply because it worked once.

There is something almost suspicious to me about comfort.

If I already know precisely how to do it, why am I doing it again?

Madonna taught me that, the way she has continuously refused the security of repeating an approved version of herself.

Years ago, speaking about age and beauty, she explained that she does not think of herself as fighting age. She simply keeps putting herself in unfamiliar and challenging situations. As she put it:

“If you keep putting yourself in challenging, new adventurous situations, then you keep yourself alive and youthful.”

Her youthfulness has never depended entirely on looking young, but on remaining curious, moving countries to support her personal and creative goals, learning new sounds, working with younger artists, and entering rooms where she does not already know the outcome.

She taught generations of us to leave other things, too, such as shame, rules that existed primarily to keep us obedient, ideas about sexuality that belonged to somebody else, the expectation that women should be liked before they are listened to.

The need to become simpler so other people can understand us…

And there is the important complication here discussed earlier.

Madonna never understood reinvention as killing the old self. She kept what she needed, while the foundation remained.

Every reinvention added something instead of deleting everything that had existed before.

Confession after experience

In Confessions on a Dance Floor the nightclub was understood as transformation. Each song, like in Confessions II, blended into each other, and twenty-one years later, confession carries more memory.

Madonna has said that Confessions II emerged during an extraordinarily difficult period. Her brother Christopher was seriously ill and later passed away. Her stepmother, with whom Madonna had endured a painful relationship since childhood, had also died. Her daughter Lourdes approached her about making music together as a way of working through their relationship.

It is obvious that Confessions II could never have been Confessions on a Dance Floor again.

The first record belonged to the life she had in 2005, where as this new one belongs to the woman who survived everything between them.

There is grief. Forgiveness. Betrayal. Family. Freedom.

Most importantly, there is the continuing desire to express something simply because Madonna still possesses the freedom to express it.

“One Step Away” is particularly important to me for that reason.

Freedom has always been one of Madonna’s most persistent forces in art.

Freedom to move.

Freedom to desire.

To leave.

To believe.

To contradict herself.

Freedom to be vulgar one minute and spiritual the next.

Freedom, above all, to resist being made legible according to somebody else’s rules.

The woman who refuses to disappear

For decades, Madonna has been punished for continuing to exist publicly and wanting more.

She continues being sexual and ambitious, dressing for herself, creating and working. And at the same time people have repeatedly asked for the “old Madonna.”

What does the “old Madonna” mean? The one from the ’80s? From the ’90s? From Ray of Light. From the first Confessions?

The old Madonna is safe, we already know what she did. And it is already approved.

The things that caused outrage have been canonised, which means the scandal has become nostalgia.

People can now celebrate what they once might have condemned without confronting the far more uncomfortable fact that the same woman is still here, still exercising the same freedom now.

Madonna ageing publicly has exposed an extraordinary contradiction.

Culture loves the rebellious older woman retrospectively.

It is much less comfortable for the ageists watching an older woman continue to rebel in real time.

And Madonna knows this game too well.

In her recent conversation with Interview, she said something wonderfully revealing about nudity. After decades in which nakedness was one of the things used against her, she now finds the opposite more interesting.

“Now I don’t want to be naked because everyone’s naked.”

That is Madonna.

She spent years being told to put clothes on and now that everyone has taken their clothes off, Madonna would rather think and wear them.

Rebellion cannot remain rebellion once it becomes uniform.

Madonna wearing more clothes now does not mean she has surrendered her sexuality. That is freedom too.

And perhaps this is why the obsession with whether Madonna is “too old” has always missed the point. She is not asking permission to be a younger woman. She is just refusing the demand that an older one should disappear.

Maybe reinvention was never about becoming somebody else

Since I was a child, I have been watching Madonna reinvent herself, I loved learning the word “reinvention” and probably I will associate it with Madonna.

But I assume I have been thinking about the word incorrectly, because maybe Madonna has never repeatedly become somebody else.

She has spent a lifetime discovering how many different people can coexist inside one person.

Madonna’s reinventions made the definition of herself larger.

That may be why Confessions II feels so satisfying now. It does not ask us to forget Confessions on a Dance Floor or any previous era.

Madonna herself has said that revisiting the past now interests her precisely because she wants to do it on her own terms—to take old material, disturb it, look for another meaning and refuse to perform it exactly as the audience expects.

At 68, Madonna has enough history behind her to understand that every one of those women was real.

The girl who arrived in New York with almost nothing.

The woman who scandalised the Vatican.

The woman who made motherhood part of a spiritual awakening.

The disco queen in the purple leotard.

Madame X with her multiplicity of identities.

The woman who nearly died.

The woman who survived.

The woman who went back into the studio with Stuart Price because the world felt dark and she believed people needed to dance.

None of them has to win.

None of them has to disappear.

And maybe that is Madonna’s most important reinvention yet.

Not becoming someone the world has never seen before, but becoming complicated enough to contain every version of herself the world has already tried to define.

And she is still not finished.

Maurice Fonson has spent enough time being sad and is now ready to open the Fun chapter.

This became clear during our recent conversation about Fun, his forthcoming project that marks a lighter chapter for the songwriter and artist whose credits include Madonna, Jennifer Hudson, Leona Lewis and Sebastián Yatra.

Now, with “Sweet,” the first single from Fun, that change finally enters the world.

The song catches Maurice removed from the emotional weight that shaped much of his earlier music. Instead of dissecting heartbreak or revisiting what went wrong, “Sweet” lives inside the uncomplicated pleasure of being completely taken by someone.

The song, he explains, comes from that particular stage of infatuation when another person seems to become everything for a moment.

“I’m dating, I’m out here in these streets, and I just want to enjoy it,” he says. “It’s that feeling when somebody has you hooked and you almost don’t care. They’re just sweet.”

That lightness is the universe of Fun.

Maurice does not describe the project as an attempt to deny everything that came before it. His earlier music was deeply autobiographical, often shaped by heartbreak, uncertainty and the long process of letting go. Fun simply finds him somewhere else now.

He has healed enough to want pleasure back. No need to immediately turn attraction into something larger than it is.

For a few minutes, Maurice Fonson is simply allowing something to feel good.

And after years of writing through heartbreak, that may be the sweetest reinvention of all.

Studying at Xavier University of Louisiana, at nineteen, Maurice Fonson was in New Orleans, attending classes and doing all the things a student is supposed to do while trying to imagine what adulthood might eventually look like.

On Fridays, however, he would leave school and fly to New York.

Craigslist was still Craigslist, as he remembers it, and independent producers and artists would post jobs looking for writers and musicians. Maurice would arrive in the city, spend Saturday inside somebody’s smoke-filled studio writing hooks, go to the Village Underground on Sunday night to listen to singers at the open mic, then head straight to JFK.

The flight back left around five in the morning and chemistry class started at eight.

That was his routine for approximately two years.

Watch our full conversation on YouTube or continue reading the article.

He tells me there was barely any money in it, as he would spend whatever he earned on the flight ticket and a night in a hotel. Only his grandmother knew what Maurice was really doing. Someone, after all, needed to know where he was.

And what Maurice knew was that he wanted music badly enough to keep returning to New York every weekend.

“I had this ambition and this dream to be a massive singer, songwriter and performer,” he tells me on a Zoom call from New York at the end of July. “But I didn’t necessarily know how I was going to get there.”

We almost always like to arrange the past while telling stories about success once success has already happened, and every difficult decision begins to resemble foreshadowing. The airport floors, the missed flights, bad jobs, unpaid work, failed relationships and self-doubt become necessary characters in an origin story whose ending now seems obvious.

But life could never be neatly organised while it is happening.

Maurice’s career did not wait for him to understand himself though. There was heartbreak and fear. But there was also ambition.

Before the credits

Maurice remembers Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation tour as the first concert he attended at the age of seven or eight. There were difficult things happening inside his household, and music offered him an escape, another place to go to.

Curiosity led him to discover Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis as the people composing Janet’s hits and those of others of his favourite artists, and he recalls their work as foundational to the way he understood songwriting. Maurice later discovered artists such as Babyface and Diane Warren and became fascinated by writers who could evoke emotion through their craft.

The songs he heard as a child changed their essence as he grew older because life gave him the context he had not possessed at seven or eight. Lyrics carried meaning he could recognise from his experience.

“That’s what makes music universal,” he says. “We’re connected by experiences.”

It became a kind of blueprint of learning how someone’s private experience could leave one person’s life and somehow enter somebody else’s. Even as a young man, he knew he wanted to be famous, to sing, to write, and years later he would carry his experience into the songs he would write for himself and for others.

Writing yourself through somebody else

One of the more revealing moments in our conversation arrives when Maurice tells me about “Unlearn Me,” a song originally written as a demo for Leona Lewis that can still be heard on YouTube.

At the time, he was going through what he believed was the end of a difficult relationship. As he would discover soon, there would be more heartbreak to come.

He had reached the point where he wanted to somehow remove the relationship from himself—to unlearn the person, the love and the version of life they had built together.

So he wrote the song—for somebody else.

He tells me that writing for another artist can require imagination, but sometimes the artist arrives with a story and the session begins to resemble therapy as everybody tries to find the language for what that person is experiencing.

And sometimes Maurice’s own life entered the room. He shares he could place pieces of himself inside the music another artist might eventually sing.

Which makes us doubt if there is a significant distinction between Maurice Fonson, the songwriter, and Maurice Fonson, the artist. It turns out the credits might make those identities look separate, but his emotional life never really did.

“The things happening in my personal life will always seep into the music,” he says.

As the years passed, that life continued moving beside the career, into something quite familiar to all of us.

There were broken hearts. Jobs. Family problems. The pandemic. Relationships that would not end cleanly.

Earlier projects such as The X Files became places where he could further explore what had happened to him—what he had done, what other people had done, and what remained once a relationship was supposedly over.

Meanwhile, professionally, Maurice was already becoming the person his nineteen-year-old self had flown to New York hoping to become.

Success does not wait for certainty

Jennifer Hudson.

Leona Lewis.

Sebastián Yatra.

And now Madonna.

Names so impressive, a person would assume the story would look simple from the outside, even if it was not.

“If you had told me two years ago that I would have a song on a Madonna album, I would have said, ‘You’re crazy,’” Maurice says.

His work on “School” for Madonna’s Confessions II marks what he describes as another level in his career, one that has brought new attention to him. It might even come across as “overnight success,” but Maurice knows better.

“There were so many times when I wasn’t sure whether I was ever going to be seen,” he says.

Now the recognition is arriving, but he does not talk about it like someone who believes the work has finally been completed. He talks about levels and what is next, and about being thankful.

Maurice does not pretend to be indifferent to success. There is so much excitement that drives his engine. He tells me he would like to embark on a world tour, win a Grammy, write for Beyoncé, Rihanna and Usher.

Maurice also insists that underneath every accolade sits the same reason he was willing to spend almost everything he earned travelling between New Orleans and New York.

“This is still a piece of my soul,” he says.

The Fun version

When Maurice talks about his upcoming EP Fun, his face lights up and he is obviously happy and full of joy.

While much of his previous music had often come from heartbreak and introspection, that is not the space he wants to inhabit anymore.

“I’ve been sad long enough,” he says. “I’ve healed. This is the new version. This is the healed version of me.”

Fun began taking shape in early 2025, after some family difficulties and a broader reassessment of what Maurice wanted his life to contain after the pandemic.

He wanted to keep what made sense and what felt good, what did not sit quite so heavily on his spirit.

The title Fun sounds deliberately uncomplicated because, in some ways, it is. Maurice just wants to have fun. And he wants the listeners to have fun.

He describes the project as light, joyful and escapist—the world has not suddenly become light, but it never can.

“We’re living through a dark period,” he says.

But perhaps, for twenty minutes, music can allow us to remove the darkness and just enjoy the rhythm.

His first single from the project, “Sweet,” arrives on August 14, and carries that lighter Maurice into the world. He describes himself now as bubbly, easygoing, even “a lovable teddy bear,” and he shares the song lives inside the uncomplicated pleasure of being infatuated with somebody.

“The song is about being a little infatuated — that feeling of being so into somebody that you’re completely open. I feel like that right now. I’m dating, I’m out here in these streets, and I just want to enjoy it. It’s that feeling when somebody has you hooked and you almost don’t care. They’re just sweet. They’re everything in that moment.”

There are deeper moments across the project, and another EP is planned to explore more of what it took for him to arrive at Fun in the first place.

It is interesting sequencing—Maurice is giving us the joy before showing us what has built it.

The old skin does not disappear

The Wonder Mag’s August issue has been built around the idea of a Summer of Reinvention, and I asked Maurice whether reinvention means becoming somebody entirely new or removing versions of ourselves that no longer fit.

His answer resists the clean transformation. He says we carry the past with us.

“You can shed your skin and reinvent yourself,” he says, but whoever emerges still exists because of what came before.

The successful songwriter still remembers wondering whether anybody would ever see him. And the healed version still remembers heartbreak.

When I ask which version of himself he wants to leave behind, Maurice answers quickly.

“The scared version.”

I ask what still scares him.

“A lot of things.”

Maurice is learning not to beat himself up as relentlessly as he once did. He does not want the clouds permanently hanging over him anymore.

Time, however, remains one of the more difficult fears — “like an enemy in my head,” he says.

Sometimes he still believes certain things must happen immediately. If they do not, the mind can make the delay feel catastrophic.

It is difficult not to recognise something painfully contemporary in that feeling as we are all surrounded by public timelines or a stranger we see in our feeds talking about success without bringing any of the years that preceded it.

Maurice has lived long enough inside music to know that careers rarely move according to the timeline somebody imagined at nineteen. He is learning to believe something else now:

“What is mine will be mine in the time it is meant to be mine.”

He admits that accepting this is difficult, but perhaps that is why it matters.

There is no ceiling

When I ask what excites him most now, his answer is immediate.

“There are no limits. The sky is the limit,” he says. “There’s no ceiling.”

Two years ago, Madonna seemed impossible, and now their record sits on his résumé.

Maurice wants the Grammy and the global career. He wants the debut album he is already working toward. He wants to tour the world and move across genres.

There is something almost circular about hearing him say that, now that I know the story of the nineteen-year-old who kept travelling to New York without knowing exactly how any of it would happen.

That boy had ambition before certainty, while the Maurice speaking to me now has evidence.

It is not evidence that success finally turns you into a finished person, but evidence that a person can still be becoming while the life they wanted has already begun.

Our idea of success being the final and completed version of ourselves is not always true, and Maurice Fonson’s career suggests otherwise.

Sometimes the doors begin opening while you are still carrying heartbreak through them.

Recognition arrives while you are still afraid of time.

And sometimes, after years of turning pain into songs, reinvention can sound unexpectedly simple.

It can sound like allowing yourself to enjoy what has already arrived.

It can sound like Fun.

Picture it: you open Tinder and you see somebody bearing the particular facial features, hair, body and confidence that you fancy. In other words, the particular traits our culture has taught us to desire.

You swipe right, and almost immediately begin preparing yourself that you two will not match. Before they have rejected or accepted you, the hierarchy has already been established.

They are the person who gets to choose. You are the one waiting for confirmation whether you are worthy of a match or destined to disappear into the void with everyone else they have swiped left on.

This exact hierarchy was labeled as “Models and Mortals” in the second episode of the pilot season of Sex and the City.

The episode introduces the modelizer: a breed of man obsessed with women, much like the womanizer, but with the core distinction that the modelizer is obsessed not with any women, but with models.

To a modelizer, being chosen by a model becomes evidence that he must possess extraordinary qualities other men do not, because the title “model” is a symbol of access, achievement, status, and beauty—qualities that models presumably would not spend on just anybody.

Almost thirty years after that episode aired, in 2026, there are still modelizers, and maybe they are even more numerous, because if in 1998, they needed access to New York fashion parties and the women whose faces and bodies appeared in magazines, then nowadays, the modelizers need only a smartphone.

We are all models now

Professional models still occupy a glorified position in our culture, their faces still sell advertisements, and their bodies are still treated as properties of their agents and the public, at least partly.

But the distinction between models and mortals today has become significantly less stable as social media has made almost everyone pose for a version of themselves:

The pretty one.
The young one.
The cute one.
The smart one.
The ambitious one.

We choose how to present ourselves online through photos and different angles, posing at glamorous or recognizable locations, and we all feel the need to display our work, family life, and relationships as something that requires public validation.

Technically, we are all modelling ourselves.

Bulgarian designer and artist Stoyan Dimitrov describes social media as the modern equivalent of a corset, as he mentions in our interview, without even realising how accurate he has just described our new current.

“Social media determines how people see us,” he explains. “We build the structure of the corset there and shape the figure through which we want to present ourselves.”

According to him, that figure shall not be understood only as the body, because today, our partners are another part of the silhouette, too.

The partner is evidence

When we introduce our partner to other people, we rarely present only that person.

We also present the version of ourselves that exists beside our chosen ones, so they have to meet some criteria of course.

We want them to look good, to have beautiful hair, an attractive face, a well-maintained body, appealing style, and some other quality suggesting that this person could have chosen anybody.

And yet, they have chosen us.

Their desirability becomes evidence of ours.

If somebody beautiful has chosen us, perhaps we must be beautiful enough. If somebody interesting has stayed beside us, perhaps we must be interesting too. If the person appearing beside us in our photographs seems impressive, then perhaps their presence confirms the version of ourselves we want other people to see.

None of this means that attraction to beauty is shallow, not that every picture of a happy couple is a performance. Beauty is real, so is desire, and so is the pleasure of looking at somebody we love and believing they are extraordinary.

But the pursuit of perfection can become increasingly insatiable.

Stoyan describes it as an appetite that expands as soon as it is fed.

“When you take a bite and become satisfied,” he says, “you start looking for the next one—bigger, with more flavour and colour.”

So the partner becomes an upgrade.

One person completes and adds the final touches to the desired version of ourselves, and the potential future partner seems capable of completing an even more impressive version.

This may resemble reinvention, but when an identity is primarily built from the outside, the reinvention can never quite be complete.

The violence of feeling insufficient

In “Models and Mortals,” Miranda painfully discovers that intelligence, career success and ordinary attractiveness cannot compete with somebody chasing the status of a “model”, so in the modelizer’s eyes, Miranda is a mortal.

Today, this is still valid.

People who are not conventionally attractive may possess intelligence, sensitivity, humour, artistic ability and fascinating ways of understanding the world, yet never receive enough initial attention for those qualities to become visible.

Choosing a partner today, especially through dating apps, while we are still seeking the perfect match, could feel like being trapped in a cage built from first impressions.

For much of my life, I have been put in boxes, too—cute, sweet, sensitive, geek—and I am not saying that those words are cruel, they are true.

But they are incomplete.

Being perceived as “cute” does not mean I am not ambitious, nor does it erase my sexuality. Being described as sensitive can sometimes make my complexity sound fragile, even though I know it is not.

I cannot count the number of times I have wanted to say:

Yes, I am sweet. I am also smart, intelligent, difficult, artistic, hot, ambitious, and capable of holding a conversation that extends beyond the limits of:
“Do you have a place?”

Yet it seems our appearances arrive before we do, and they make it easy for people to sort our personalities into categories they find convenient to comprehend.

Within gay dating culture, what is generally considered desirable is the muscular body, the carefully maintained beard, and a specific performance of masculinity.

And there is me—a twink, bearing a moustache—looking at the kind of “gorgeous” man I described and assuming, before I have even swiped, that he would never choose me.

And just like that, I appoint myself the mortal.

The person on the cover

If the mortal fears that nobody will look, the model fears nobody will look beyond the label.

During her decade-long career, Vogue Ukraine cover star, Bulgarian supermodel Ivelina Choeva-Kadieva has learnt that the features one culture interprets as flaws may be precisely what another considers remarkable.

In certain pictures, she has noticed that she might appear slightly cross-eyed. In Bulgaria, she has encountered comments mocking that difference, but internationally, it became part of what made her face interesting enough to hire.

“They have given me work and paid me precisely because of that imperfection,” she told me in our conversation, “because somebody, somewhere, found it beautiful.”

That immediately complicates the idea of perfection, because beauty is not necessarily defined by correcting every slight asymmetry until a person resembles a culturally approved image. Sometimes beauty is defined exactly in the asymmetry, the small flaws, or the feature that prevents a face from becoming interchangeable.

But being recognised as beautiful creates another problem.

Choeva does not pretend beauty has never helped her. A striking or well-maintained person naturally receives attention, she says, and physical appearance can make certain doors easier to open.

Yet after completing her education in London and entering another professional field, she discovered that the same image that once granted access could also prevent people from taking her seriously.

She had been understood as a model, as beautiful, as a woman with long legs. When her work demanded another kind of competence, she had to convince people that the person behind the appearance could actually perform it.

“Almost all of these women have other qualities and interests beyond what is shown,” she says of models and influencers, remembering colleagues who studied medicine or spoke six languages while travelling and working.

Beauty can elevate and diminish a person simultaneously.

It attracts the gaze, but can narrow the terms under which someone is understood, and it turns out the image arrives before the human being and threatens to become the final verdict.

Even nakedness can become a costume

The episode’s darkest expression of the modelizer appears through Barkley, who secretly records his sexual encounters with models.

First of all, this act today would be scrutinised even more severely: the recordings are non-consensual and explicit, intimacy turns into a collection of trophies, and the women themselves become evidence of his worthiness.

Consensually sending an intimate image on a social media app is fundamentally different from recording somebody without their consent, but both exist within a visual culture in which even nakedness can become part of the performance of worth.

We send images hoping to prove that our bodies possess the correct forms, proportions or sexual characteristics. We present ourselves at our most physically exposed to strangers for rapid assessment and turn nudity into a costume when it is performed primarily to secure approval.

Being chosen does not cure the fear

I have dated men I considered extraordinarily attractive in entirely different ways.

One looked like a fashionable Apollo and was emotionally unavailable. Another was intellectually impressive as well as physically attractive and very pretty. Another had long hair, tattoos and a body unlike anybody I had dated before.

Before each of them chose me, I doubted that they ever could.

And even after they did, being chosen did not permanently remove the doubt.

This may be the modelizer’s most humiliating secret—you may have a beautiful partner beside you and still believe you are the mortal who somehow was granted access by mistake.

And today, we have become both model and modelizer

That realization made me stop.

For most of this piece, I had been wondering whether I had been the model or the mortal to the men I dated.

But I had not realized I had also been a modelizer. I was being evaluated, but I was evaluating, too.

The men I dated were all gorgeous, therefore, they were worthy of being chosen, and I was always very proud of walking beside them through the streets of Istanbul. I also particularly remember the pleasure of entering somewhere together noticing people turn their heads:

“We are getting noticed,” I would think and I would even hold my partner’s hand even tighter.

And there it is—I chose. My partners chose. I desired them partly because I found them desirable and their desirability sometimes made being chosen by them feel even more significant.

We swipe through people while knowing other people are swiping through us.

We curate ourselves on Instagram and dating apps, and we select photos, manufacture first impressions. So we are models.

We assess other people’s faces, careers, lifestyles, and status. So we are modelizers.

And everyone else is doing precisely the same thing to us. So everyone is both a model and a modelizer.

And suddenly, Sex and the City Season 1, Episode 2 begins to resemble an early version of a culture that swallowed almost all of us.

What happened privately between me and my former partners is now built into contemporary dating—everybody presents, everybody evaluates, and everybody wants to be chosen by somebody they themselves consider worth choosing.

Which translates into:

We’re all modelizers because we are casting.

We’re all models because we are auditioning.

When the corset comes off

Stoyan Dimitrov’s metaphor reaches its most revealing point when he imagines the moment after the corset has been removed.

Underneath it, the person is naked—the structure that shaped the body into a silhouette is no longer there.

“If the people in front of whom you have undressed accept you as you are,” he says, “then you never needed that corset.”

This may be the real challenge of connection in 2026.

Not whether we can attract somebody through the image, but whether we can survive being known after the image is gone.

Not whether somebody will display us proudly, but whether they can understand the qualities that cannot be photographed.

Not whether we can reinvent ourselves through the person beside us, but whether we know who we are when we stand alone.

The answer is not to deny beauty, attraction often begins with appearance.

The answer is to allow the gaze to become curiosity, and curiosity to become knowledge—something capable of complicating the first impression rather than merely confirming it.

Maybe the most radical reinvention is not becoming somebody the world would proudly display, nor becoming someone who always evaluates, nor continuing to live simultaneously as model and modelizer.

Maybe reinvention is becoming somebody who no longer needs another person’s beauty to prove that I deserve to be seen.

My first vivid memory of Whitney Houston is not of hearing her sing, I certainly had before, but of the day I learnt she would never sing again.

I was nine years old when Whitney Houston died in February 2012. The world had seemed to stop for a second, and nobody could process the news - Whitney Houston, dead at forty-eight. Families all over the globe were devastated, as if they were mourning a close friend or relative.

Mine was no different. My mother played only Whitney’s music for days after learning of her passing, as though the walls would hold the melody forever. And probably they do, now that I am thinking about it again.

It was the first time I remember witnessing the death of an artist feel almost like the death of somebody people actually knew.

At nine, of course, I could not understand the scale of what had been lost. I knew the songs, I knew the impact Whitney had on music, but I would have to grow older to begin understanding the woman behind all that.

Years later, during the lockdowns of 2020, I finally started listening to Whitney Houston properly, and I do not mean the inevitable greatest hits that everybody cherishes, but the albums, the performances, and her interviews. I was curious to get closer to her as much as I could.

Whitney had already been gone for eight years, and yet sitting in front of the television in the living room felt like discovering a new friend, someone I could obviously never meet, but someone whose way of talking about life could still reach mine.

Her 2009 conversation with Oprah Winfrey became a favorite of mine and at that time I watched it as a source of inspiration on how to close one chapter of your life, take the lessons, and move on. The image of Whitney returning after years of public speculation and criticism felt like evidence that somebody could fall apart publicly and still find the courage to stand in front of the world again.

Three years ago, while writing about what would have been Whitney Houston’s 60th birthday, I spoke with Larry Armstead II, associated with The Whitney Houston Platinum Club. He offered an interpretation of the Oprah interview that I still think about whenever I see footage of it online.

For him, Whitney’s conversation with Winfrey was an attempt to reclaim authorship over a life that, by then, had been interpreted by everybody else.

“I don’t think the purpose of the Oprah interview was to make anybody say: ‘Oh, poor Whitney, I feel so sorry for her.’ She wanted to own her truth, because for so long the media and the press had owned her truth. And she was like: ‘You know what? I’m going to take the power of it. I’m going to say that this is what happened to me. I was there. This is how it went down.’”

When the world owns your image

Whitney Houston’s career turned her into one of the defining voices of modern pop music, but her voice also created enormous expectations around what it was supposed to remain..

People remembered how it sounded when they first fell in love with her, and by the time Whitney embarked on what would become her last world tour—the Nothing But Love World Tour—there were discussions around the changes in the artist’s voice.

@erickjones783#whitneyhouston This is some of the vocal performances from nippys final tour in 2010 the hating media never showed, because there jealus hatrfull people, #stillgotit #thevoice

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Larry acknowledged that life choices had affected the instrument, but he also spoke about the extraordinary pressure Whitney had lived under. He did not forget to mention the physical strain of performing through personal hardship, and the sheer amount of herself she continued to give to audiences:

“Even towards the end, when she was struggling with having the most powerful vocals that she knew she was capable of, she still came out there, and she gave you everything she had. That is the epitome of Whitney: ‘I’m going to give you the best of me. You give me all of you, and I’ll give you all of me’, is what she would always say.’”

Today, I am looking at all of that through a different lens.

Why does the public continuously expect the people it adores to evolve while simultaneously demanding that the qualities it first loved remain untouched?

People live, and living inevitably changes them. Experience alters the conditions under which their gifts exist. Bodies change. Voices change. Or sometimes people simply age. Groundbreaking.

As a society, we have reached a moment where everyone is an expert in health, body image, productivity, vocal delivery, and the list could go on, and we publicly share our insulting opinions online, without taking into consideration that the people we are commenting on are human beings with feelings, too.

Suddenly evolution becomes decline. But a human voice is not a museum exhibit. Neither is a human being.

Whitney could not remain permanently in the times when the world first decided she was The Voice.

And perhaps part of the tragedy of being given such an enormous title is that every later version of yourself is compared with the person you were when you earned it.

The impossible comeback

@whitneyhouston#OnThisDay in 2009, Whitney made her final ever appearance at the Grammys. She walked onstage to a standing ovation. #whitney #whitneyhouston #fyp

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Whitney returned with the album I Look to You in 2009 after years of people repeatedly declaring her career was over.

Larry remembered the pattern clearly: people would count her out, insist she would never sing again, and Whitney would return anyway.

We love comeback stories because they allow us to believe that life can be repaired.

However, the public has turned comeback into an expectation or a demand that the artist returning will return unchanged, wanting to see the same body, face, confidence, and energy.

That is not a comeback, though. That is something resembling restoration, but human beings are not The Empire State Building standing tall above New York, unchanged by the passing of time.

When Whitney returned with I Look to You, she came back older, altered by experience, and she carried a voice that no longer sounded exactly as it had at twenty-two. That is precisely what made her return human and genuine.

Reinvention is not recreating a former self seamlessly, but allowing yourself to return while carrying what has led you to that reinvention and noting that the person returning is different from the person who left.

The woman behind The Voice

A nickname like The Voice is not given to everybody, but to a person whose identity and talent can carry it. Undoubtedly, that person is Whitney.

Carrying that nickname, however, can be a little dangerous, because the person possessing it is somehow reduced to it and to what she gives everybody else.

We look at artists as if they are required to be people who are unmistakably worthy of looking up to. Perhaps it is enough to take their art seriously without demanding that their private lives provide us with moral instruction.

Whitney was a voice.

She was also a woman whose interviews reveal her humour, stubbornness, faith, vulnerability, irritation, warmth and a desire to be understood beyond the mythology around her. That is fascinating.

Understanding her does not require approving every choice she made. The woman was more complicated than the title.

That is one reason Larry recalled the conviction with which she performed, her relationship with audiences, and the sense that, even when she was struggling, she continued to give everything she had.

The world heard extraordinary notes.

The person producing them had to live the life required to make them.

Those are not the same story.

The greatest love of all

@wearespotlight36 years ago ⏮ @Whitney Houston released ‘Greatest Love of All’ ❤️ #throwbacksongs #80smusic #80sthrowback #whitneyhouston #fyp

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There is a reason “The Greatest Love of All” became such an important piece of Whitney’s legacy.

Its message is about self-love, self-belief, and reaching the inner strength. Every listener, though, takes something slightly different from it.

Larry told me that the song took on an entirely different meaning after a devastating breakup. During that period, he began treating its central idea as work—going inward, rebuilding and learning how to rely on something inside yourself when external reassurance disappears.

What makes me reflect on what he said is that self-love here appears to be closer to a form of authorship in the decision that nobody else gets the final word on who you are.

Not a partner who left. Not an employer who rejected you. Not a journalist who wrote badly about you. Not the audience that fell in love with a previous version of you.

Not even the person you once believed you had to remain.

You decide what happens next. That does not mean the rest of the world stops talking.

Whitney certainly knew that.

Knowing your own strength

Another Whitney song became part of the language Larry used when we spoke in 2023: I Didn’t Know My Own Strength.

To him, Whitney’s life repeatedly demonstrated that people could collapse without permanently disappearing.

He described her as somebody whom the public repeatedly counted out and who continued finding ways to return.

In 2023, I perceived that primarily as a proof Whitney was resilient, but today I think Whitney had the strength to stop performing the version of herself everybody expected.

Larry imagined that, had Whitney lived, she might eventually have stepped away from the pop industry, perhaps she could have been singing gospel or jazz occasionally, perhaps simply singing at home, growing older without proving that she could still perform at the level the world demanded.

Nobody can know what Whitney Houston would have chosen, but there is something moving in the possibility of Whitney no longer having to fight for the right to remain Whitney Houston.

Just a woman allowed to live.

Whitney, at 63

Today Whitney Houston would have turned 63.

The obvious way to commemorate that date is to return to the voice. And of course we should.

The recordings remain extraordinary. The performances remain part of musical history. Generations who never experienced Whitney Houston in real time continue discovering what happened when she opened her mouth and sang, and perhaps they are discovering her from a better place, where they do not attach to her image what the tabloids were once writing.

But perhaps remembering her properly also requires remembering there was an actual person, not just the gift she left us.

There was always somebody underneath The Voice.

A woman who was celebrated, scrutinised, idealised, dismissed, welcomed back and repeatedly interpreted by strangers.

A woman who, at one of the most important moments of her later career, sat down and attempted to tell the story herself.

That is the Whitney I find myself thinking about each time I see something related to her.

Not just the woman who reinvented herself. The woman who tried to reclaim herself.

Perhaps that is the greatest love of all - learning that your life remains yours even after the world has developed its own version of it.

The world called Whitney Houston The Voice.

Maybe one of the most loving things we can do now is remember that she was always so much more than that.

Archival note

This essay revisits and reinterprets reporting first published in 2023 for Whitney Houston’s 60th birthday, including an interview with Larry Armstead II, associated with The Whitney Houston Platinum Club.

Had someone told me half a year ago that today I would be writing August’s Editor’s Letter for my own publication, The Wonder Mag, I would have thought they were kidding.

Instead, today, having just returned to Istanbul from my summer trip to Rome, there is nothing more natural to me than writing and interviewing again.

For years, I was convinced that my work as a journalist was over, and that I had to accept the fact that I had turned myself into a full-time language teacher who had moved cities in search of escape and relief from the environment that had shaped him.

None of this turned out to be true.

All it took for the exhausted teacher to return to his actual identity was therapy that had been long overdue, personal space in which he could breathe and think without the constant noise of the outside world, a library that would become his headquarters, and the confidence to recognise that now he carried far more life experience than he had imagined.

Today, I am writing this letter not as the exhausted teacher I was at the beginning of the year, nor as the editor I hope one day to become, but as living proof that change is possible.

Proof that you can take a chapter of your life you thought had been closed, turn it around, and realise that you can redefine its ending, and then create a new beginning.

That is where August begins for The Wonder Mag.

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Sure, there is a backlog from July and I was not pleased to “kill” beautiful features as I was putting August into shape, but there are moments in life when we shall learn not to regret everything that had not been done, but absorb and understand what the current situation is revealing.

Sometimes, it can reveal the strange recognition that a home can remain unchanged while the person entering it has shifted.

At other times, it reveals that the old life has stopped fitting, while the new one is not yet built.

So you keep building.

We enjoy picturing reinvention as something glamorous — glorious comebacks, transformations that prove we have changed, while having somehow preserved our core identity, but in reality, reinvention is often messy and it requires time.

This is where I find myself in August — the old life has begun to lose its grip, but the new one is still being defined.

Two weeks ago, I travelled to Rome for the first time and discovered myself walking through its streets, capturing in my mind every building, landmark, and small corner, and I felt I was breathing with ease while envisioning future possibilities.

I returned to Sofia for a week, where some old habits and family dynamics reminded me that nostalgia is real, but reinvention is never a clean escape from everything that came before.

And now I am back in Istanbul — the city where I learned independence and rebuilt my relationship with writing and publishing.

So this month, The Wonder Mag is looking at reinvention not as one of those dreamy before-and-after stories, but as a process that teaches us through its own uncertainties, strategies, and tiny bumps across the road.

August will begin by completing a conversation that started in July.

In “MODELIZERS,” we will return to the second episode of Sex and the City and examine what happens when attraction becomes part of social identity and the person beside us begins to function as proof of status or personal worth. The feature brings together ideas that emerged during my recent conversations with Bulgarian model, Ivelina Choeva, and Bulgarian fashion designer, Stoyan Dimitrov, binding their points of view and asking what we borrow from the people we crave — and what image we attempt to create for ourselves through them.

We will revisit the work and legacy of WHITNEY HOUSTON around her heavenly birthday, as I introduce you to an interview from my archives, looking again at her extraordinary achievements and at why certain artists never stay in the past, but continue to inspire.

On MADONNA’S BIRTHDAY, we will look at the woman who continues to redefine pop music and has turned reinvention into a work of art.

This issue will also include a major international interview with songwriter and artist MAURICE FONSON, one of the writers of “School” on Madonna’s new album Confessions II. We spoke about his extraordinary career, songwriting, ambition, his forthcoming EP “Fun” set to be released on August 28, and the person behind the professional credits.

Later in the month, EVAN HOLOVATSKYI, an international coach specialising in voice design, public speaking, and personal image, will speak about one of the most intimate forms of reinvention - changing the way the world hears us. Our voices reveal age, confidence—or the lack of it—and authority before we have finished the sentence. Is it possible for a person to reinvent their voice without pretending to be someone else? And can learning to sound more powerful change the way we perceive ourselves?

There will also be a new essay about ARIANA GRANDE, public scrutiny and the strange entitlement audiences feel towards women’s bodies, health and visibility. Here, the question is no longer simply how a famous woman reinvents herself, but whether disappearing from view may become the most radical reinvention on the table.

And finally, the month will conclude with an essay about Amy Odell’s beautifully written biography of ANNA WINTOUR, which accompanied me through my own period of rebuilding and reclaiming.

All of these stories ask different versions of the same question:

What happens when the identity that brought us here can no longer carry us forward?

We can never know what tomorrow will bring, but maybe, just maybe, reinvention does not require complete certainty.

Perhaps it requires us to enter the uncomfortable space between what has ended and what has not begun yet — and to start creating from there.

Welcome to The Summer of Reinvention!

Ivan Ssavsski
Founder and Editor-in-Chief
The Wonder Mag

As we are catching up on the latest events in our lives and talking about some trends we have seen recently, Bulgarian designer Stoyan Dimitrov begins what will become our interview with an undressing before I have even asked a single question.

“When you take off the corset, you are left naked,” he says, as if it were the most common way to start a conversation about anything, whether it is a garment, a body, or a life. He tells me that social media is the corset now. We shape ourselves inside it, we allow it to hold us in the form we would like to be seen in, and underneath it we are exactly as naked as we always were.

It is a strange thing to hear from a man who has spent twenty-five years building structure into fabric for a living.

As a child of the 1970s, Stoyan found himself in a Bulgarian classroom in a subject called Practical Training, and while the other boys were sent toward woodworking and mechanics, Stoyan found textiles as the one station that did not frighten him. Soon his grandmother’s fabrics — the bolts she had kept from weddings and christenings (a way earlier generations stockpiled cloth) — were sacrificed to Stoyan’s first attempts at sewing.

He could not have known back then that this passion would turn into his path, but he knew it was interesting, which, for a child, is sometimes the same thing.

By the time he realized it mattered, he knew exactly what he wanted, and what he was willing to do to get it. Told by his family to keep his options open and study something practical alongside design, he sat the entrance mathematics exam knowing perfectly well he would do badly.

“I pretended I was practising mathematics, pretended I was studying, and pretended I understood,” he tells me, still showing a faint pride in his own younger nerve. The drawing exam — the one that actually mattered — was easy to pass. He was accepted third out of six boys in the whole region of Stara Zagora. And just like that, a door opened onto a road he has been walking ever since.

It is interesting to witness how a boy who sabotaged his own test scores to secure a particular future, decades later, describes an entire generation’s self-presentation as a corset we have built and cannot easily unlace.

Before it was anything else, the corset was simply a technology of taking a body and insisting it become a different shape than the one it arrived in. Stoyan does not romanticize this. Fashion, he says plainly, has always crossed the line between aesthetics and cruelty, and it crosses it often on women’s bodies in particular, because womenswear has always allowed for more dramatic transformation than men’s ever has.

He points me toward the Met Gala as he shares that he is “convinced they feel extremely uncomfortable in what they are wearing,” talking about the smiling, photographed bodies on that carpet. “Nevertheless, the point is the presentation.”

He is careful, though, to say the old rigid arithmetic — the 90-60-90 measurements that once defined what a body had to be to count as fashionable — has loosened globally, even if unevenly. Runways and campaigns increasingly hold space for bodies that would once have been rejected outright, mentioning examples of different ages, ethnicities, and shapes.

“Those old limitations no longer apply in the same way,” he tells me — the same sentence that Bulgarian supermodel Ivelina Choeva reached for when she talked about the industry that hired her precisely for the asymmetry Bulgaria once called ugly. Two people arrive independently at the same observation, that the rules are real, but they are not as fixed as the people inside them once believed.

Except — and here his voice changes — the newly-found liberation from standards does not arrive everywhere at the same speed. Eastern Europe, he says without much softening, remains “a slave to idealisation.” Filtered faces, corrected lips, a culture still fluent in the language of what can we fix. He does not exempt Bulgaria from this, and when I mention what I have noticed in Istanbul — the same appetite for sculpted, corrected, idealized bodies — he does not seem surprised. It is a shared inheritance, he suggests, not a coincidence.

The West, he believes, is drifting back toward the natural and the authentically imperfect. Eastern Europe, according to what he has observed, is still catching up — sometimes five years behind, sometimes more. Whether or not the timeline is exactly right, the diagnosis he makes is that “appearance matters to us far more than substance. We sell ourselves more through appearance than through knowledge.”

This is the part of the conversation Stoyan has clearly thought about before I ever asked. Social media, he tells me, has simply replaced the literal garment as the thing that shapes how a body — or a life — gets seen. “It is the foundation of the corset,” he says.

“From that point, the colour is added.” Everything else — the caption, the angle, the story we tell about ourselves online — is just detail laid over a structure we have already agreed to wear.

What is striking me is how little judgment he brings to this, because he does not frame the impulse to curate as vanity or dishonesty. Instead, he says that it seems closer to an old habit fashion has always understood, but is now practised by everyone instead of a professional few: “Anyone can create a different image of themselves and invent a story in order to conceal the truth.”

He does, however, draw one distinction that matters — the difference between how someone sees us and how we have chosen to present ourselves to be seen. The first is out of our hands. The second — the corset itself — is a decision, made and remade daily, about which version of the truth to put forward. “How they choose to see us after that is their decision,” he says, almost releasing the audience from responsibility for a costume he acknowledges he built himself.

There is a version of Stoyan that has nothing to do with a brand, a Met Gala, or a corset trending under someone else’s feed. It shows up when he paints — and when I ask about it, something in his voice shifts. “Perhaps I am saying it in this way for the first time,” he tells me, and then admits that he paints mostly in difficult states — heavy ones, the kind that do not always announce themselves as sad until he is already halfway through the canvas.

Behind him, out of frame for most of our conversation, hangs The Three Graces — three women caught in a pose he describes as unnatural, tense, and deliberately uncomfortable. He wanted the viewer to feel what the bodies on the canvas feel. He never finishes a painting all the way, he says he leaves it just short of resolved, because resolution would mean the emotion had nowhere left to go. And he almost never paints a full face. An eye. Part of a mouth. A suggestion of a person, never the whole of one. “That is why my paintings often contain an eye or part of a face, but never the complete face. There is mystery in it.”

It is a private, inverted version of everything the corset conversation was about. Online, in fashion, in front of a camera, he has spent a career helping people build the structure that lets them be seen the way they choose. On canvas, alone, he does the opposite as he studies someone until he understands what is underneath their own presentation, and paints that.

Which brings the conversation, inevitably, back to where it started — to the line he offered before I had asked anything at all. “When you undress as a person and show yourself as you are, you are left naked.” The corset comes off. What is underneath was always there, waiting on the other side of the shaping. “If the people before whom you have undressed accept you as you are,” he says, “then you do not need that corset. It was unnecessary to create such an image of yourself.”

It is a generous theory of exposure — that the risk of being seen without the structure is outweighed by what is on the other side of it, if you are brave enough, or simply tired enough, to take the corset off in front of the right people.

Корсетът някога е бил скрит под дрехата. Стягал е тялото, променял е силуета и го е приближавал към представата на съответната епоха за съвършенство.

Днес корсетът отново е видим. Носи се върху тениски и ризи, появява се на червения килим, в музикалните видеоклипове и в ежедневния стил. Но съществува и друга негова версия — невидима, дигитална и значително по-трудна за сваляне.

Това е образът, който изграждаме в социалните мрежи.

В него подбираме снимките, ъглите, телата, дрехите, местата и историите, чрез които искаме да бъдем видяни. Оформяме не само външността, но и представата за начина си на живот, социалния си статус и възможностите си. Ако старият корсет е държал тялото в определен силует, новият държи публичната ни самоличност.

Стоян Димитров познава и двете страни на образа. От близо 25 години той работи като моден дизайнер, а извън модата рисува тела, лица и фигури, които често оставя умишлено незавършени. В професионалната си работа за AVIN Boutique следва разпознаваема линия, a в изкуството търси онова, което остава извън нея.

Разговаряме за първите му опити с платовете на баба си, за двойката по математика, която получава съвсем умишлено, за повторенията в модата, телата, които индустрията вижда и пропуска, естествената красота, Сексът и градът, modelizers, самотата зад публичния образ и корсета като новото бижу.

Но най-вече разговаряме за това какво се случва, когато най-накрая го свалим.

Разговорът е редактиран и съкратен за яснота и дължина.

Гледайте целия видеоразговор

В пълния разговор за The Wonder Mag Стоян Димитров говори за модата, красотата, корсетите, социалните мрежи, изкуството и онова, което остава, когато свалим филтрите.

Дрехата като език

Кога разбра, че модата е езикът, чрез който искаш да говориш?

Обикновено хората казват, че нещо е станало случайно, но истината е, че при мен нищо не беше случайно.

Аз съм от поколението на 70-те години. Когато бяхме в пети, шести и седми клас, имахме часове по трудово обучение с няколко различни специалности. Едната беше текстил. Тогава разбрах, че това ме вълнува.

Всички останали неща — механика, техника, дърводелство — не ме интересуваха. Даже малко ме плашеха. При текстила беше различно. Не осъзнавах, че това ще бъде пътят ми, и не го планирах като професия, но ми беше страшно интересно.

Тогава започнах и да унищожавам платовете на баба ми. Тя имаше много материали, останали от сватби, кръщенета и други семейни събирания. По онова време хората са подарявали платове, защото не е имало толкова магазини, и те са се съхранявали с години. С тях направих първите си опити.

Три-четири години по-късно вече знаех, че това ще бъде моят път и че искам да уча точно това.

И тогава съвсем умишлено си изкарваш двойка по математика?

Да. Правех се, че се упражнявам, че уча и че разбирам математика. Отидох на изпита и знаех, че няма да направя кой знае какво. Не беше точно двойка, беше 2,50, но то е почти същото.

Изобщо не ме притесни. След изпита по рисуване бях абсолютно щастлив, защото знаех, че оценката ще ми бъде достатъчна, за да вляза в специалността, която исках — конструиране и моделиране на облекло в Стара Загора.

Бях приет на трето място. В специалността приемаха само шест момчета от цялата Старозагорска област и двадесет момичета. Чувствах се адски щастлив, защото бях постигнал целта си.

Оттам нататък пътят сякаш тръгна сам. Отвори се вратата и аз продължих по пътеката, по която вървя и до днес.

Как започна професионалният ти път?

В началото на 2000-те влязох в магазин, защото търсех плат. Там се запознах със собственичката на модния бранд AVIN, в който по-късно започнах работа. Заговорихме се — откъде познавам материите, какво разбирам от тях и какво уча.

По същото време те организираха национален конкурс „Млад дизайнер“. За онази година кандидатите вече бяха избрани и си казах, че ще участвам следващата.

Мина една година и почти по същото време отново се оказах в Стара Загора. Разбрах, че конкурсът е започнал, включих се и спечелих награда. Трябваше да създадем няколко модела, а част от участниците получиха възможност да направят още, за да се оформи малка колекция.

Точно тогава трябваше да вляза в казармата и цялата церемония се проведе без мен. Чух по телефона, че съм спечелил, и бях изключително щастлив.

След като се уволних, направихме среща и се разбрахме, че сме един за друг. Така вече близо 25 години съм част от този екип.

Защо модата винаги се връща

Когато погледнеш работата си сега, виждаш ли теми и силуети, които се повтарят?

Повторяемост има и тя е неизбежна. Още когато учех дизайн, говорехме за повтарянето на определени силуети, линии, цветове и тенденции.

След толкова години работа разбирам, че модата наистина се движи на цикли. Всичко обаче преминава през призмата на настоящето. Когато нещо, което познавам от моето време, се появи отново, материите вече са други. Височината на талията, кройката, структурата и начинът, по който се носи дрехата, също са различни.

Но винаги има препратка към миналото — независимо дали към нещо отпреди десет, двадесет или повече години.

В крайна сметка дрехите вече са измислени. Имаме панталон, пола, риза, палто. Не можеш да създадеш напълно ново наименование на дреха, но можеш да направиш нова конструкция, да добавиш елемент, да смесиш стилове.

Можеш да вкараш нещо от бельото в ежедневното облекло или елемент от връхната дреха в спортния стил. Неща, които на пръв поглед изглеждат несъвместими, могат да бъдат пречупени през погледа на дизайнера и да станат приложими.

Днес има огромна свобода в начина, по който смесваме дрехи и изграждаме личния си стил. Преди стиловете са били налагани по-категорично от определен дизайнер, марка или епоха. Сега можеш да съчетаеш препратка към хипи или рейв модата с голямата класика и със спортния стил.

Въпросът е всичко да бъде добре смесено и добре поднесено.

Тялото, материята и силуетът

Когато започваш една дреха, кое идва първо — тялото, материята, силуетът или движението?

Много е относително. Когато работиш за бранд, понякога водещ е моделът, който ще представи конкретната колекция. Тогава създаваш дрехата спрямо него.

Моделът трябва да предаде настроението и усещането на дрехата. Трябва да се създаде химия между човека, който я носи, дизайна и екипа, за да бъде моделът представен добре.

В други моменти водеща е материята. Понякога вдъхновението идва от определен десен и той поставя началото на цялата колекция. Може да се превърне в централния елемент на линията.

Затова не мога да кажа, че едно нещо винаги е по-важно от друго. Всичко зависи от конкретната колекция и от историята, която искаме да разкажем.

Каква е функцията на дрехата за тялото — да го разкрива, да го защитава или да го трансформира?

Зависи за кой период говорим. Когато дрехите са били създавани първоначално, тяхната функция е била да защитават, предпазват и прикриват.

В днешно време функцията на дрехата е да ни представя.

Макар да звучи тривиално, по дрехите посрещат. Когато се запознаваме с някого, първото, което виждаме, е начинът, по който изглежда. Разбира се, не трябва да бъдем повърхностни и да изграждаме цялата си представа само от това. Следват разговорът и комуникацията.

Но живеем в динамично време, в което всичко трябва да се случи сега, ако може — още вчера. Интервюта за работа, презентации и различни събития са свързани с начина, по който изглеждаме, и с това какво казва външният ни вид на хората отсреща.

Дрехата ни представя. Значение има какво ще изберем и как ще го носим. Това е свързано и с настроението, темперамента, амбицията и енергията ни. Всички тези неща оформят цялостния образ.

Кои са първите елементи, които забелязваш в облеклото на един човек?

Никога не съм се замислял дали обръщам внимание на конкретен елемент. По-скоро забелязвам цялостното излъчване.

Не е важно само дали са съчетани правилно цветовете, блузата, панталонът, полата или роклята. Важно е как човекът се представя пред мен, както и аз се представям пред него.

Всеки има моменти, в които не е в най-добрата си форма. Но дори тогава дрехата може да помогне да прикрие спад в настроението или кондицията.

Казват, че малката черна рокля решава всичко. Решава го — ако знаеш коя малка черна рокля да избереш и с какво да я съчетаеш.

Но за мен най-важно остава излъчването.

Кое тяло вижда модата

Има ли тяло, което модата все още предпочита, и такова, което продължава да игнорира?

В глобален мащаб вече няма толкова строги ограничения. В рекламата, телевизията, киното, музиката и модния бизнес виждаме много по-различни фигури.

Появяват се хора на различна възраст, с различни форми, цвят на кожата, етнос и пол. Не се търси единствено онзи стар, познат и строго определен тип тяло с мерки 90–60–90.

От друга страна, тук, в Източна Европа и конкретно в България, все още робуваме на известна идеализация на образа. Тя се поддържа и от различните приложения, които използваме.

Питаме се коя снимка е най-подходяща, защо устните ни не са по-сочни, защо бюстът не е по-голям, а при мъжете — защо тялото не е достатъчно оформено.

Приложенията ни дават възможност да постигнем тази идеалност и вече почти всеки ги управлява толкова лесно, колкото управлява автомобила си.

В България постепенно се отдалечаваме от това, но все още вярваме много силно в живота, който представяме в социалните мрежи.

Виждаш ли завръщане към по-естествената красота?

Да. Най-лесно може да се забележи в рекламите. Все по-често те поставят акцент върху естественото — без големи корекции, без непременно да се търси идеалната фигура или съвършеното лице, понякога дори без грим.

До България тези неща често достигат една, две, три или пет години по-късно.

Тук все още живее спокойно мисленето как да станем по-съвършени и какво още да коригираме. Външният вид често ни е по-важен от стойността, която носим. Продаваме се повече като външност, отколкото като знания.

Но вярвам в новото поколение. За много от младите хора е важно да бъдат истински и да бъдат това, което са. Напомнят ми на моето поколение — поколение на бунтари, но в добрия смисъл на думата. Хора, които искат да преследват целите си и да постигат амбициите си, без да пречат на другите.

Когато красотата се превърне в статус

Когато днес търсим партньор, търсим ли и определена идея за физическо съвършенство?

Ако говорим за България, идеалната фигура и идеалният човек продължават да бъдат много важни. Има завръщане към нормалността и към по-чистото, но е в по-малък процент.

Повечето хора продължават да гледат перфектната фигура, тена, косата, ръцете, социалния статус и възможностите. Ако притежаваш всичко това, се превръщаш в „идеалната хапка“.

Проблемът е, че когато отхапеш от тази хапка, след време вече искаш по-голяма — човек с повече възможности, повече дадености и по-висок статус.

Така започваш да се състезаваш със самия себе си и да търсиш нещо все по-измислено. Накрая може да стигнеш до момент, в който нищо вече не ти е интересно.

Във втория епизод на Сексът и градът се появява думата „modelizer“ — мъж, който преследва модели не непременно заради самите жени, а заради статуса, който образът им му дава. Продължават ли красивите хора да бъдат третирани като обекти?

Да, и това няма скоро да приключи. Но не се отнася само до мъже, които преследват красиви жени. Има и мъже, които търсят идеална партньорка, която да им осигурява всичко необходимо, докато те просто бъдат красиви до нея. Има и жени, които търсят същото чрез партньора си.

Тези модели продължават да живеят в България.

Когато някой вече е вкусил от този начин на живот и е превърнал определени неща в свои ценности, много трудно се връща към по-нормален ритъм.

Но може да дойде момент на недостиг — на емоции, любов, отношение и разбиране. Тогава животът дава голямата плесница и човек може би разбира как не трябва да живее.

Зад красивия и публичен образ много често има и страшно много самота. На тези хора им се диктува къде да се усмихнат, как да изглеждат, какво да направят и дори какво не могат да ядат, защото веднага ще се заговори за тях.

Затова понякога най-простите неща са най-необходими — някой просто да бъде до теб, една прегръдка или малка разходка. Тези моменти показват, че човекът не се е изгубил напълно, въпреки че му се налага да живее и работи в друг свят.

Модата и контролът над тялото

Къде е границата между естетиката и това да бъдем груби към тялото?

Тази граница понякога се прекрачва.

Създават се силуети, които са изключително неудобни, но са актуални. Това се случва най-често при жените, защото при дамската мода трансформациите могат да бъдат много по-големи.

Met Gala е сцена, на която можем да видим неудобството на модата в крайна форма. Наблюдаваме усмихнати и популярни личности, но съм убеден, че дълбоко в себе си много от тях изпитват сериозен дискомфорт от това, което носят.

Идеята обаче е представянето на тоалета. Колкото и да е неудобен, той трябва да бъде показан.

В последно време забелязвам и завръщане към елегантността — изчистване на пошлото и прекалено помпозното. Това е чудесно. По-добре човек да привлича внимание с елегантност, отколкото с нелепия си външен вид.

Помагат и персоналните стилисти — хора, които могат да насочат обикновения човек към неговия собствен стил. Когато намериш начин на обличане, в който се чувстваш комфортно, повдигаш глава и ставаш по-уверен.

Корсетът през 2026

Корсетите отново са навсякъде — под дрехите, върху тях, на червения килим и в ежедневния стил. Как гледаш на завръщането им?

Корсетът някога е бил бельо, което оформя фигурата под дрехата. Изкарването му на преден план днес е напълно нормално и не е нещо съвсем ново.

Извайването на фигурата може да бъде част от артистичността на определена личност. Виждаме го в музикалния и в модния свят. В ежедневието не присъства в същата степен, но вече съвсем спокойно може да бъде част от него.

За специални поводи корсетите се появяват във всевъзможни форми. За мен корсетът е новото бижу. Ако преди години акцентът е бил върху колиета, обеци и часовници, днес корсетът може да изпълнява тази функция.

Има и мъжки корсети, които придават по-екстравагантна визия.

Аз съм много „за“ корсетите. Те могат да подчертаят форма и да променят структурата и настроението на друга дреха. Корсет върху тениска или риза може да стои страхотно.

Можеш да приключиш работа с овърсайз риза и много бързо да промениш цялата си визия за вечерта, без да сменяш целия тоалет. Добавяш корсет и вече имаш парти визия.

Мисля, че ще продължим да ги виждаме и през 2027 година.

Ако корсетът някога е оформял физическото тяло, кой е неговият еквивалент през 2026?

Това е комбинация от социалните мрежи, филтрите и процедурите, но основното са социалните мрежи.

Много често си изграждаме представа за човека отсреща според това, което публикува. Правим бърза характеристика на социалния му статус, начина му на живот и възможностите му.

За мен социалните мрежи са основата на съвременния корсет.

След това идват цветовете и различните елементи — начинът, по който комуникираме и представяме себе си. Всеки може да създаде различна версия на своята история и да прикрие част от истината.

В социалните мрежи изграждаме структурата на корсета и оформяме фигурата, чрез която искаме да се представим. Не става въпрос само за това как другите искат да ни видят, а как ние искаме да бъдем видени.

Какво се случва, когато свалим този корсет?

Когато свалиш корсета, оставаш гол.

Под физическия корсет тялото е голо. Същото се случва и със социалните мрежи. Когато се разсъблечеш като личност и разкажеш какъв си в действителност, оставаш гол пред другия.

И ако хората, пред които си се разкрил, те приемат такъв, какъвто си, значи не си имал нужда от корсета. Било е излишно да изграждаш различна представа за себе си.

Камерата, дрехата и желанието

Когато тялото се гледа през камерата, кой има най-голямата власт — дизайнерът, моделът, клиентът, публиката или самата камера?

До известна степен отново стигаме до въпроса как ще бъдем погледнати отсреща. Това прави камерата много важна.

Говоря от личния си опит като дизайнер — онова, което искам да създам, невинаги ще бъде възприето по начина, по който съм си го представял.

Когато казваме „камерата“, всъщност поставяме зад нея хората. Те решават как ще разберат това, което съм направил. Те определят кое е голо, кое е вулгарно и кое е приемливо.

Какво прави една модна снимка успешна?

Много важна е симбиозата между модела, снимачния екип, дизайнера, стилиста и локацията. Всички елементи трябва да заработят заедно.

Кадърът трябва да бъде въздействащ. Трябва да ти говори, да те привлича или да те съблазнява.

Грубо казано, сексът продава. Но не става дума за буквалния сексуален акт. Става дума за апетитното излъчване и онова хищно привличане, чрез което снимката те кара да пожелаеш нещо.

Много често клиентът иска да бъде човекът, когото вижда на снимката. Вярва, че дрехата ще стои по същия начин и на него.

И колкото повече вярваш, че една дреха може да ти стои така, както на модела, толкова повече започваш да се трансформираш психически и емоционално.

Не е нужно да правиш корекции, за да изглеждаш като момичето на снимката, или да променяш цвета на косата си. Нужно е нагласата ти да се промени и да достигнеш нивото, на което искаш да бъдеш.

Това може да бъде надграждане на личността — стига да е в нормални граници, да не надскачаш себе си и да не се превръщаш в арогантен човек.

Тялото в изкуството

Освен моден дизайнер, ти си и артист. Как изобразяваш тялото в своето изкуство?

Много често рисувам образи и части от тела.

Имам картина с три женски фигури - “Трите грации”, които стоят в неестествени и неудобни пози. Исках зрителят да остане под напрежение и да почувства тяхното неудобство върху платното.

В други картини търся прикритата еротика — силует, фигура или детайл, който загатва определени форми. Често присъства око или част от лице, но почти никога цялото лице.

Загадката е важна.

Винаги стигам до момент, в който сякаш картината е почти завършена, но нарочно я оставям така. Ако я завърша докрай, ще съм приключил с нея и няма да имам следващата емоция. А на мен ми трябва следващата емоция.

Оставям пространство, в което зрителят или човекът, който притежава картината, да потърси себе си. Да поиска да разбере къде е краят и какво стои зад изображението.

Трудно ми е да обяснявам картините си, защото ги рисувам в емоционално състояние, а не по задание или предварително изготвен план.

Когато работя по поръчка, първо разговарям дълго с клиента. Опитвам се да усетя неговото настроение, живота му, преживяното и онова, което иска да му се случи в бъдеще.

След като го опозная, сядам да рисувам. В известен смисъл съм го разголил — но само аз знам каква голота съм видял и пресъздал.

Може ли изкуството да ни помогне да приемем телата си, вместо постоянно да ги възприемаме като проект за поправяне?

Може. Но от разговорите си с други колеги съм стигнал до мисълта, че ние, хората на изкуството, често сме хора с ниско самочувствие. Крием се зад това, което творим, и търсим себе си в произведенията.

Много често изобразяваме нещо, което обичаме, или онова, което първо забелязваме в другите.

При мен често това са очите, лицето или изражението на жена. Картините ми нерядко са тежки и тъжни.

Може би за първи път признавам толкова директно, че рисувам в трудни състояния — когато преживявам нещо много лично и ценно. Не е задължително да е загуба. Понякога може да бъде нещо красиво, което ме е впечатлило, но аз преживявам и тъжната му страна. Всяко нещо има две страни.

Хората на изкуството се разсъбличаме и разкриваме чрез музиката, картините, поезията, книгите и актьорската игра.

Имаме много личности в себе си и всяка от тях се опитва да излезе на преден план. За себе си мога да кажа, че чрез рисуването човек най-лесно може да разбере какъв съм по душа и какво живее в мен.

В модата има правила и филтри, които са необходими. Те оформят линията на бранда. Изкуството е мястото, където човек може да ме види без тези филтри.

Красотата няма възраст

Какво представлява красотата за теб и променя ли се възприятието ни към нея с възрастта?

Днес има изкривяване във възприемането на красотата. Говорихме за корекциите и за това как някои хора с много сериозни промени по себе си вярват, че са постигнали абсолютната красота. Това е тяхно право, но реалността невинаги е точно такава.

Красотата се намира в излъчването.

Колкото по-уверен е човек, колкото по-стабилно е самочувствието му и колкото по-отворени са погледът и душата му, толкова по-красив става.

За мен външната красота няма възраст.

Има млади хора, които заради ниско самочувствие, липса на контакти или постоянно потискане остават незабелязани. Това не означава, че не са красиви.

Когато пораснат и придобият повече увереност, излъчването им започва да се разгръща. Виждаме повече цветове от тях и изведнъж хората казват: „Колко красива жена“ или „Колко красив мъж“.

Този човек е бил красив и преди десет или двадесет години. Просто душата му е била по-затворена.

На модния подиум можем да видим жена на 60 и момиче на 18. Коя е по-красива? И двете са еднакво красиви. Просто имат различно излъчване.

Едната може да внушава строга елегантност, а другата — лека, младежка фриволност. И двете могат да бъдат изключително красиви.

Как се става дизайнер

Когато създаваш модели за бранд, остава ли място и за личната ти фантазия?

Разбира се. Всеки бранд има разпознаваема линия и това е напълно нормално. След толкова години моето мислене и линията на екипа са се доближили.

Представям си го като пътеки, които вървят една до друга. Понякога леко се разделят, после отново се събират. Това е напасване на линия, вкус и усещане за модерност.

Когато създаваме модел, всеки от нас вкарва част от себе си. Точно там се намира личната свобода — в детайла, който добавяш от себе си, без да разрушиш цялостния език на бранда.

Ако дрехите ти можеха да говорят, какво биха казали на новия си собственик?

Удобство, стил и излъчване.

Какъв съвет би дал на хората, които искат да се занимават с моден дизайн?

Преди всичко трябва истински да вярват, че го искат.

Това, че имаш възможност да купуваш скъпи дрехи или умееш да се обличаш, не те прави дизайнер.

Пътят е много дълъг и има много компоненти, които трябва да усвоиш и да започнеш да прилагаш ежедневно. Не е достатъчно да знаеш как да съчетаваш готови дрехи.

Трябва да знаеш как да ги конструираш, как да създадеш правилната форма и как да подбереш материалите, които са подходящи за конкретната дреха.

Това е широка и сложна професия с изключително много неща, които трябва да научиш. Най-важното е наистина да искаш да извървиш пътя.

Има хора, които тръгват много уверено, но бързо се отказват, когато разберат, че не знаят нищо отвъд купуването на готов продукт.

Това не те прави дизайнер.

Дизайнерът е човекът, който знае как да създаде и поднесе нещо така, че ти да го пожелаеш. Професията е много отговорна и пътят до нея е труден.

Понякога хора са ми казвали: „Какво толкова правиш — носиш една картинка, ушиват ти я и е готово.“

Не е така.

Зад една дреха стои много повече.

Гледайте целия разговор със Стоян Димитров в YouTube канала на The Wonder Mag.

Разговорът е част от юлската тема на The Wonder Mag: тялото, образът и иконата.

It is late afternoon in Taksim, Istanbul. Think of it as Times Square with more impatient taxis, more cigarette smoke, and a slightly higher chance that someone will interrupt your thoughts by shouting into a phone.

Cars are honking around me, but I am not expecting Madonna to step out of a cab on Istiklal the way she did when she moved to New York at nineteen and told the driver to take her to the centre of it all.

Instead, I am reading Madonna’s interview for Interview magazine, while sitting outside the cultural centre that saves me from the city’s chaos.

Somewhere nearby, Ricky Martin is sound-checking for his Istanbul concert. I am, apparently, absorbing the legacies of two iconic artists at once, without having asked to.

Ricky’s voice is floating over the noise of Taksim and for a second I think of the version of myself from a year ago, who would have opened Grindr, certainly invented a reason to walk to the stadium, and casually investigated each five-star hotel in the area in the name of pure journalism or poor decision-making.

This time I stay with Madonna’s interview before I create a logistical scandal.

In Interview, she talks about releasing Confessions II at a dark time in the world — about memory, prayer, phones, and the state of mind she wants to invite listeners into. And I begin to understand the album even better than I did the first time I listened to it, while riding on a ferry to the Princes’ Islands.

On that first listen, while Fragile was playing, I could not help but let the tears run down my face as I thought of my late father, whom I often see in my dreams, much like Madonna speaks of seeing her brother to whom she dedicated the song.

Confessions II makes even more sense now that I have lived with it for a week and played it twice every day. On first listen, it even felt as though Madonna was reintroducing us to album-listening at a time of fast beats and TikTok sounds. I remember thinking:

Now this vision has shifted into viewing this album as a refusal to let the algorithms take over and become the only rhythm we follow.

In Bring Your Love, Madonna sings, “don’t try to distract me with numbers” — a rejection, as she has explained in interviews, of everyone who has tried to talk her into decisions built around the album’s potential virality. It is really embarrassing how views, likes, and shares seem to shape the way we perceive ourselves nowadays, and how they even influence certain artists’ creative decisions, which sometimes makes music today come across as shallow.

The same resistance to disposability is present in Confessions II - The Film, a 13-minute long visual project that introduced the world to the album’s ecosystem before the album itself was released.

Visuals and music videos barely exist the way they used to, and when they do, the lack of imagination is often disturbing — as if a full cinematic experience is no longer worth the investment when a fifteen-second trend will do.

At such a time, Madonna returned with a short film.

Not a teaser, not a disposable clip.

A film.

A film that left viewers once again in awe of her creativity and artistry through ritual, memory, choreography, bodies, the mythology of the album. It gives soul to the songs and reminds us that pop music was never just sound, but image, provocation, choreography.

What it demands, in other words, is attention and repetition, as the album itself does not ask to be consumed and discarded, but it asks the body to remember something our phones keep interrupting.

This may be why the album connected so quickly with the millions of its listeners and became an immediate success — another wake-up call from the Queen of Pop.

Just a few hours after this feature was published, Confessions II debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.

Madonna released several versions of the album, including the Icon Edition, Grindr Edition, and Instrumentals, and at one point three of the four occupied the top three spots on iTunes Worldwide for several days in a row.

That success suggests that listeners are still hungry for the full experience of entering an album’s world, that does not resemble something they can scroll past.

Confessions II, like all Madonna albums, is not supposed to be background music. It asks you to tune in, immerse yourself in the sound, let one song lead to another, dance, reflect, and return to the dance floor — to remember we still have bodies through which we can express ourselves, not just display on social media.

And it asks you to trust that dancing was never a distraction from the real thing.

It was always the real thing.

So perhaps the question that the album asks us to answer is:

When was the last time you moved your body because you meant it, and not because someone was watching?

I find Ivelina Choeva-Kadieva, Bulgaria’s diamond in the modelling industry, at the very beginning of the summer, relaxing in the quiet of her home. She is avoiding the sun and the heat, not because she insists on keeping her skin snowy white, but because she is carrying a new life in her body.

Ivelina calls this stage of her life an amusement park with a visible spark in her eyes — carousels, little cars, we bump into each other, we fall, we get up.

That is a strange thing to hear from a woman who has spent most of her life being measured.

At thirteen, she left Haskovo for Milan on a pink airplane, carrying a pink Bulgarian-English phrasebook in her bag, “in case something happened,” she says. Nothing in her childhood had initially pointed toward runways and spotlights. She had a strict mother, and Ivelina was following the blueprint of the perfect student, her grades had to stay perfect, too, and she was even attending mathematics competitions.

Everything, she tells me, went inside her notebook. “This is my current notebook; I have many others.” She is organized, neat, and tidy, and it is actually not surprising. Her entire self was built on precision, considering that a model’s body is watched and documented. It is part of a model’s grammar.

Ninety centimeters here, not ninety-two. A girl that is 1.85 meters tall and a girl of 1.75 meters height are held to the same number anyway, because the industry rarely bothers to ask whether its arithmetic is fair.

So how does a woman built on precision arrive a little more than a decade later at a life, resembling an amusement park?

That is where this conversation actually starts.

She tells me that the years before her pregnancy were not calm. She and her husband, actor and TV presenter Aleksandar Kadiev, were — in her words — “in a hundred places at once.” Somewhere underneath the busyness of it all, they were beginning to try for a baby, and there was the belief, as she jokingly says, that this too could have gone into the notebook, checked off like everything else.

“I had always imagined it would happen quickly,” she says. “Or that it would just happen, without planning it so much.”

When it did not, the stress began to take up more and more space. The pressure became internal, too, outside the chaos of day-to-day life. Every morning, she found herself thinking about the same thing.

People around her kept offering the least helpful piece of advice anyone would like to hear while they are inside the experience: calm down.

“At some point, I got tired of worrying,” she says. “I said to myself: Fine. If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. I couldn’t do it anymore. I was exhausted.”

And yet, with time, she arrived at the lesson everyone had been trying to give her, not by waking up feeling enlightened on a nice morning, but because she had no other choice.

“I see it as a lesson from fate and as a life lesson — that I cannot control everything,” she says. “And the moment I somehow let go of control, it happened.”

I ask her why she thinks people still refer to pregnancy as something beautiful and natural, but rarely talk about the struggles some women go through. She tells me that everybody around her talks openly about that and she is in a no-filter circle, that was always supporting her, but there was a loneliness underneath it all that no amount of support could fully reach.

“No matter how much you share with someone — even with my husband, who is in this with me — you start to feel lonely,” she says. “Because, after all, you are waiting for something to happen inside you.”

Support, then, becomes essential not because it removes the loneliness completely, but because it makes the loneliness survivable.

“Support is very, very important,” she dives deeper. “The most important thing is to calm down, yes, but you cannot calm down if you don’t have the kind of support that makes you feel safe.”

Pregnancy, for Choeva, has not erased the old vocabulary of modeling, but is teaching her to replace it.

“I’m not going to lie to you,” she says. “I have 10 to 12 years of experience as a professional model, and I think that has a huge influence. I’m used to looking a certain way.”

Now her body is changing. She knows this is normal. Still, there are moments, “I get out of the shower, I see this, I see that,” she says, half-laughing at herself.

Her eye is trained, and her questions are actually not irrational, because inside them lives the history of an industry.

“Have I gained too much weight? Is this new here?”

Her husband, she says, laughs at the questions, too, because his eyes have not changed, even if her body has started to. “In his eyes I see that he still likes me very much and loves me very much. That gives me security and calm.”

She is learning to meet the change with admiration instead of measurements — to stop translating her body into the vocabulary that she has absorbed, because old grammar disappears slowly.

But Choeva does not dramatize the old grammar - she does not perform suffering for the sake of story, nor does she pretend that modeling is a uniquely tragic profession. She is just honest about the industry and its requirements. It is a job, and if you would like to do it, then you have to meet the requirements.

“To work as a model, you have to be within certain measurements,” she says. “My body is the kind that, if I eat, I gain weight — I’m not one of those stick-thin girls.”

In her teenage years, when the body naturally begins to change and form, those changes collided with professional expectations. There were several years, she says, when she did “terrible things” with diets and not eating. She sees it now as a mistake.

“The industry doesn’t care very much about how you feel,” she says. “What matters is being within the measurements.”

Still, guided by resilience, her story is one of curiosity, independence, discipline, friendship, and taste.

After she received the offer for a contract in Milan when she was 13, she saw that as a great way to make her life more interesting.

“I was like: There it is. The gods, the stars, this is it,” she says. “I couldn’t believe it.”

More contracts followed — Asia, Europe, the United States — while she continued her education independently and returned to Haskovo once a year to pass her exams, still having to keep up to the image of the perfect student.

“I had no real idea what the world was like,” she says of that first Milan trip. “I was simply endlessly interested. I was like a sponge. I wanted to touch everything, talk to everyone, hear every story, learn everything.”

There was glamour, of course, but not always in the way people imagine.

“Glamour is what you see in magazines,” she says. The rest could be crowded apartments, tiny rooms, strange cities, shared space, early call times, and constant motion. In Tokyo, she remembers rooms so small that “you take one or two steps and that’s the width,” with three girls inside.

But none of it bothered her much. She wanted something to happen. She wanted life to open.

“For me, it wasn’t important where I slept or what I ate,” she says. “I wanted something to be happening around me.”

The industry gave her independence. Discipline. A sense of beauty. A feeling for style and behavior. It also gave her an early education in the relativity of beauty — perhaps one of the most interesting parts of her story.

When she started modeling, Bulgaria was beginning to embrace artificial glamour - thin eyebrows, crimped hair, Botox, silicone. But the modeling environment around her valued something completely different - clean skin, clean hair, no makeup, naturalness, imperfections, irregularity.

“Girls with more irregular features were considered more interesting because they were more unconventional,” she says.

This is where the Bulgarian gaze and the fashion gaze began to separate.

Choeva mentions that her eyes can appear asymmetrical in some shots, as if she is slightly cross-eyed. In Bulgaria, as she became more recognizable, online comments mocked her for it.

“Who is that cross-eyed girl? What Vogue? Super ugly.”

What others treated as a flaw, the fashion world had treated as an asset.

The industry that measured her hips to the centimeter, was the same industry that hired her eventually for a Vogue Ukraine cover — because of the one thing her own country called a flaw.

“I have been hired and paid precisely because of that imperfection,” she says, “because someone somewhere found it beautiful. You can’t insult me by saying that.”

By the end of our conversation, beauty has become our main topic, larger than image. Choeva speaks about wanting her son to have a sense of beauty — not only female beauty, but the beauty of the world.

“Beauty is not a science,” she says.

Which may be why, when I ask how she would describe this exact stage of her life — no longer counting, no longer measuring against anyone else’s number — she does not reach for a statistic at all.

“An amusement park,” she says.

There are carousels, little cars, collisions, falls, getting back up. Colors everywhere. Something is always sparkling, something is always happening. It is busy, she says, but “mega cool.” She feels like a child in an amusement park.

It is a lovely answer, but also revealing.

After years in an industry where the body could be reduced to centimeters, Ivelina now describes her life not through the perfect lines or fixed measurements, but through movement and color, which is not a number someone else can approve.

Perhaps this is the new grammar she is learning now - a body changing, a child coming, a woman extending her knowledge of her own beauty.

Not the grammar of centimeters.

The grammar of wonder.

This feature is based on Ivan Ssavsski’s video interview with Ivelina Choeva, originally conducted in Bulgarian for The Wonder Mag. The full conversation is available on YouTube.

В самото начало на лятото намирам Ивелина Чоева-Кадиева в дома й. Крие се от жегите, между работни ангажименти е и мисли за августовска почивка. Навън сезонът все повече навлиза в онзи момент, в който слънцето става все по-ярко и всичко е изложено на показ — телата, дрехите, плановете, животът, който трябва да върви по план.

При Ивелина лятото на 2026 година е и нов етап.

След повече от десетилетие като професионален модел — пътувания, снимки, кампании, Vogue, Fendi и свят, в който тялото често е разглеждано като силует и образ, днес за нея тялото носи нов живот и се променя.

Разговорът ни е част от юлската тема на The Wonder Mag — тялото, образът и иконата — и може би един от най-важните уроци, които ще чуете и прочетете, е, че най-големите промени започват тогава когато спрем само да гледаме тялото и започнем да го слушаме.

Разговорът е редактиран за яснота и дължина.

В какъв етап от бременността си в момента — повече спокойствие, нетърпение или режим „подготовка“?

Спокойна съм, да ти кажа. Доста чил съм. Не са ме ударили хормоните, май. Не знам — Сашо трябва да го питаме. Но аз смятам, че съм си супер. Спокойно ми е, леко ми е все още. Работя си, не съм променила по някакъв начин ежедневието си. Добре съм. Не мога да се оплача.

Успяваш ли да съчетаеш професионалните ангажименти с бременността?

Засега успявам. Чукам на дърво, чувствам се добре и смятам, докато се чувствам така, да си правя нещата, които обичам. Разбира се, една идея съм дала задна — няма как, особено в момента с тези жеги. Това най-много ме изморява.

Но като цяло съм добре и докато съм добре, искам да правя нещата, които обичам, защото реално аз много си обичам работата — и трите ми работи. Приятно ми е.

Не си представям да легна и нищо да не правя, освен ако, не дай Боже, няма някаква причина. Не знам какво ще правя, ако нищо не правя. Някак си не си го представям.

Малката Катерина сигурно също се подготвя да бъде кака. Как го преживява?

Тя е най-щастлива от всички. Ние всички сме много щастливи, но тя е страшно развълнувана. Много се радва, няма търпение. Много е сладко да я гледаш толкова превъзбудена и съм сигурна, че ще бъде най-добрата кака.

Аз сигурно над 50 пъти гледах монтажа на видеото, в което тя чете посланието към бебето, и всеки път, когато тя започне да чете, се вълнувам. Даже сега като се сещам, пак се вълнувам. Въобще не го очаквахме.

Децата са най-искрените същества. Тя е толкова осъзната за годините си и в същото време е толкова мила и добра — не само към нас, хората, които обича, и семейството си, но и към света. Изразява любовта си и емоциите си, което е страхотно.

В интервю със Сашо споделихте, че пътят към бременността не е бил съвсем лек и че стресът е имал голямо влияние. Какво най-много ти тежеше?

Стресът беше свързан отново с многото работа, колкото и да си обичаме работата. И съм изключително благодарна — не искам тук да прозвучи, че се оплаквам, че работя. Напротив, обожавам работата си. Обожавам и стреса около нея — малко е като Стокхолмски синдром, защото той е част от цялото преживяване.

Но ние и двамата сме яхнали вълната, както се казва, и сме на сто места. Просто имаше много стрес около всичко това. Винаги съм си представяла, че ще стане бързо. Или че просто ще стане, без толкова да го планираш.

А аз съм човек на планирането. При мен всичко е в тефтера. Всичко е записано. И когато нещо по списък не върви, започвам да изтръпвам.

Мислех, че това също ще бъде едно от нещата в тефтера ми. Но го приемам като урок от съдбата и като житейски урок — че не мога да контролирам всичко. И в момента, в който някак си пуснах контрола, то се случи. Може би трябваше да науча този урок.

А как пусна контрола? Какво се промени?

Аз не се събудих една сутрин и не казах: „Ох, пускам контрола, научих си урока.“ Не. Просто в един момент дойде безпомощността на положението.

В същото време знам, че има жени и семейства, които преминават през това много по-дълго от нас — пет, шест, седем, осем години. При нас нямаше и две. Но все пак всеки си гледа в неговата паничка. За всеки неговият проблем е най-големият и най-тежкият.

В един момент ми писна да се притеснявам и си казах: „Хубаво, като не стане — не стане.“ Не можех повече. Бях се изморила.

Всички ми повтаряха: „Успокой се, ще стане, когато се успокоиш.“ От майка ми до приятелки, които са минали през това, до лекари. А аз си казвах: „Как да се успокоя? Вие луди ли сте? Как да не го мисля?“ Накрая се оказаха прави, но трябваше да стигна до това по по-трудния начин.

Въпреки всичко спокойствието е много, много важно в такива моменти.

Когато говорим за бременност, често се говори за нея като нещо красиво и естествено, а много по-малко за страховете, чакането и напрежението. Защо според теб това все още е трудно за говорене?

Честно казано, тук съм на различнo мнениe, защото в средата, в която аз се намирам, около мен всички говорят. Няма филтри. Мъже, жени — всички можем да седнем с приятелския ни кръг и да говорим. Не мисля, че има някой, с когото не сме говорили по темата или не сме споделили.

Но има един момент, в който, колкото и да споделяш с някого — дори с мъжа ми, който е с мен в това — започваш да се чувстваш самотно. Защото все пак чакаш нещо да стане в теб. Не казвам, че всичко зависи само от нас, жените, но има този момент на самота.

Всички ти казват: „Не се притеснявай, с теб сме. Дали ще стане или не, по един или друг начин ще стане.“ Но ти си знаеш какво ти е. Няма как човекът отсреща да знае точно как се чувстваш. И слава Богу, защото не е нужно всички да изпитваме негативните емоции. Но подкрепата е много важна.

Ако има семейства или жени, които не срещат тази подкрепа, това със сигурност е проблем. Дори при мен, където не беше тежък случай, аз малко се бях филмирала повече, отколкото трябва. Започнах да психясвам. Всяка сутрин мислех само за това. Това ми влияеше на работата, на отношенията ми с хората. Мозъкът ми беше зает да мисли само и единствено за това.

Аз имах support group. Моята среда не е неподкрепяща. Говори се. Имах абсолютно всички неща около мен, които са ми нужни, за да се чувствам добре и да преодолея някакви емоционални състояния. Не мога да си представя какво би било, ако го нямах.

Затова е важно — дали си приятел на някого, дали си партньор, дали си роднина — да подкрепяш жената в такива моменти. Психически не е лесно. От една страна искаш да създадеш живот, от друга се притесняваш дали си в най-добрата си форма да го направиш, дали ще можеш да дадеш това, което трябва, защо не става, какво става, хормони, какво ли още не.

Подкрепата е много, много важна. Да не кажа най-важното. Защото най-важното е да се успокоиш, но няма как да се успокоиш, ако нямаш подкрепата, която да те накара да се чувстваш сигурна.

Как в момента бременността влияе на професията ти като жена, чиято работа е свързана с външния вид?

Няма да те лъжа. Аз съм с 10–12 години стаж като професионален модел. Бях активен модел, на всеки три месеца пътувах. Това е огромна част от моя живот. И съм свикнала да се старая да изглеждам по определен начин.

Сега тялото ми започва да се променя, което е нормално. Гледам да гледам позитивно на себе си. Но тук честно казано и Сашо много ми помага, защото няма да те лъжа — има моменти, в които се чувствам несигурна.

Нормални са тези неща. Аз осъзнавам, че са нормални, но просто са нови за мен. Постоянно го питам: „Много ли съм надебеляла? Това нормално ли е?“ Според мен подкрепата на партньора е много важна. Да видиш, че в неговите очи, въпреки че си различна, той пак те харесва и обича, дава сигурност и спокойствие.

Старая се да гледам позитивно на това. В крайна сметка около мен има много примери на майки, които след бременността тренират, хранят се както обикновено и дори изглеждат по-добре от преди. Всичките ми приятелки, които са родили, са богини. Така че очаквам същия ефект и започвам да събирам tips and tricks.

От друга страна, това са едни девет месеца, в които тялото ти създава живот. Това е изключително красиво и интересно. Няма какво да си говорим — женският организъм е абсолютна магия. Аз до ден днешен си казвам: „Знам, че съм бременна, но как вътре в мен живее друг човек?“ Много странно, но много интересно.

Какво би искала всяка жена по време на бременност да си позволи — без натиск, без напрежение, без стремеж към перфекционизъм?

Да слуша тялото си. Много е повтаряно, но аз вече разбирам защо се повтаря. Когато забременях, всеки започна да ми дава страшно много акъл — с най-добри чувства, разбира се. Но при всяка жена бременността е различна. Тялото реагира различно. Не всеки съвет, колкото и да е добронамерен, ще работи за теб.

Затова е важно да се абстрахираш от целия външен шум около теб. Колкото и да е с добри намерения, то е много шум.

Да си позволиш да чуеш тялото си — какво иска. Дали иска да полегне, дали иска да ходи, дали иска лимон със сол, дали може кафе, дали не може кафе. Разбира се, има някакви граници, но трябва да го чуеш. Да си позволиш да го чуеш.

Защото пак — от control freak, каквито сме повечето, държим контрола и вървим по списък: трябва да правя това, това, това. Но когато вървиш само по списък, не чуваш какво ти казва вътрешното ти аз. И по този начин не правиш най-доброто за себе си или за детето. Напротив.

Много хора са отдалечени от телата си. И сякаш най-трудните неща станаха най-простите, които трябва да ни идват естествено. Отдалечихме се от себе си и сега трябва да работим два пъти повече, за да направим най-елементарните неща за нашето тяло и за вътрешното ни усещане. Трябва да се адаптираме към времето, в което живеем.

Да се върнем към началото ти като модел. Къде започна всичко?

Започнах с моделството, защото много ми беше скучно в Хасково. Аз съм от Хасково и винаги съм стърчала над всички. Бях много висока, откакто се помня. Винаги ме слагаха най-отзад на снимките, най-отзад на танцовите формации, защото бях най-висока.

Една приятелка на майка ми — бях на около 12 — каза: „Абе, защо не запишеш Ивето модел? Тя има стойка, хубава е, висока е.“ Майка ми беше много строг родител. Аз учех, трябваше да съм отличничка, ходех на олимпиади по математика, по английски — фокусът беше насочен другаде.

Но когато приятелката на майка ми каза за моделството, аз започнах да ровя, да търся, да разбера какво правят моделите, къде ходят да се снимат. Разбрах, че моделската кариера започва много рано и аз бях горе-долу на годините, когато можеш да започнеш. Светна ми лампичката, че това е страхотен начин да разнообразя живота си.

И започнах: „Мамо, моля те, моля те, моля те.“ Това беше в Хасково, нямаше агенции, всичко беше в София. Накрая с триста зора майка ми каза: „Добре, отиваме.“ Тя гледаше супер недоверчиво всички в агенцията, защото се сещаш — 90-те години, какви слухове имаше, какви неща се говореха.

В агенцията ме измериха, направиха ми полароидни снимки — това са снимки на бяла стена, с черен топ и черни дънки, за да може клиентът да те види без грим, без нищо. След една седмица ми звъннаха и казаха, че имам предложение за договор и да заминавам за Милано.

Аз бях: „Ето! Боговете, звездите, това е.“ Не можех да повярвам. Бях на 13.

Как майка ти те пусна сама на 13?

Като си помисля от нейна гледна точка как ме е пуснала — не знам. Благодаря ѝ. Но трябваше да мина на самостоятелна форма на обучение, защото след това дойдоха още договори. Трябваше да замина за Азия, после пак Европа, Щатите. Но успехът не трябваше да пада. Трябваше да е 6.00.

Така започнах да пътувам. Помня, че тръгнах от летище София с един розов самолет и с един розов българо-английски разговорник, не дай си Боже, ако нещо стане. Но го оставих, мен не ме беше срам, много ми беше интересно, говорих си. Така започна всичко. Веднъж в годината се връщах в Хасково, за да си взема класа, защото трябваше да взимам всеки предмет.

Не завърших с 6.00, защото вторият ми чужд език в езиковата гимназия беше немски. Голяма грешка. Не беше моето. Имах четворка, но госпожа Петрова ми прости. И химията хич не ми вървеше, но по другото бях топ.

Когато на 13 заминаваш за Милано, какво си мисли 13-годишната Ивелина?

Нищо не си представях, защото не знаех светът какъв е. Аз бях ходила до София, но нямах никаква представа. Просто ми беше безкрайно интересно. Бях като гъба. Исках всичко да пипна, с всеки да си говоря, всяка история да чуя, всичко да науча. Интересни ми бяха документите, интересни ми бяха другите момичета, които бяха по-големи.

Виждах как друг свят се отваря пред мен и нямах очаквания. Бях абсолютно разтворена. Тръгнах и исках всичко да изживея, всичко да опитам. Нямах чувство за страх или предпазливост. Просто бях готова да грабя, да хвърча, да преживявам.

Готова за the glamorous life!

Той невинаги е толкова glamorous. Гламурът е като го гледаш по списанията. Но моделските апартаменти, в които живеехме, не бяха някакви mansion-и като по Netflix. Напротив. Спала съм къде ли не — в моделски апартаменти с още четири момичета в стая. В Токио например са буквално кутийки. Правиш една-две крачки и това е широчината, а вътре сте три момичета.

Но тези неща никога не са ме притеснявали. За мен не беше важно къде спя или какво ям. Исках да става нещо около мен. Исках нещо да се случва. Беше ми безкрайно любопитно и приятно.

Впоследствие започнах да харесвам и самата моделска кариера, но не ми беше фикс идея да ставам супермодел. По-скоро исках да пътувам, да работя, в един момент да стана самостоятелна. Всичко това ми беше безкрайно интересно. И създадох много приятелства. До ден днешен най-близките ми приятелки са от тези години.

За мен не е вярно това, че моделите — като в клишетата по филмите — си чупят токчетата и се саботират. На мен поне това не ми се е случвало. Беше страхотен период. Ако трябва в десет живота да се върна и да избера дали така да прекарам тийнейджърските си години — винаги ще избера това.

Кои модели те вдъхновяваха тогава?

Синди, Жизел, Адриана по едно време — много имена. Моделите от едно време, първите супермодели, винаги са ми били интересни, защото те създават професията „модел“.

И другото, което смятам, че много ми помогна тогава, е, че по това време в България бяха модерни тънките вежди, вафлите в косата, започваха ботокс, силикон и всякакви такива неща. Докато моята среда беше тотално обратната. При нас беше важно да си без грим, с чиста кожа, с чиста коса, да поддържаш фигурата си в някакви сантиметри, но да изглеждаш добре без добавки.

Момичетата с по-неправилни черти се смятаха за по-интересни, защото бяха по-нестандартни. Това много се ценеше. Докато тук се котираше изкуственото, при мен се котираше естественото — максимално естественото. И това да приемаш, дори да аплодираш несъвършенствата, които те правят уникален.

При мен например го има това, че двете ми очи са различни. На някои кадри изглеждам малко кривогледа. И тук в България, когато започнах да ставам по-разпознаваема, четях коментари от типа: „Коя е тази кривогледата? Какъв Vogue? Какви пет лева? Супер грозна.“ А на мен ми става смешно, защото мен са ме взимали на работа и са ми давали пари точно заради това несъвършенство — защото някой някъде го е намерил за красиво. Не можеш да ме обидиш, като ми кажеш това.

Имаше ли любими проекти, по които си работила?

Vogue ми е любим, няма как. Това беше мечта. Снимахме и една много готина кампания на Fendi в Дубай.

Но истината е, че най-големите кампании, които съм правила, тези с най-много пари, не винаги са ми най-любими. Има неща, за които може би никой няма да се сети, че са част от някакъв моден бизнес, но аз ги помня много по-силно. Например по едно време майчината ми агенция беше във Финландия и с тях много пътувах из Европа — Финландия, Естония. Снимали сме едиториал от три страници за някакво абсолютно незнайно списание, но ми е останал в сърцето като един от най-готините ми работни дни. Никога няма да го забравя.

Кои са качествата, които моделството изгради в теб?

Самостоятелност, дисциплина, усет към красотата. Тези години бяха тийнейджърските ми години, когато започваш да формираш вкус. Аз съм страшно благодарна, че имах възможност да видя най-различни неща и спрямо тях да сформирам свой личен вкус, който, разбира се, се променя постоянно.

Но моделството ми даде база за усещане за красота, стил и поведение. Нямах избор, освен да порасна много бързо, но през това време и да се забавлявам на максимум.

Имаше ли нещо, което моделството взе от теб?

Не знам. Аз много романтизирам този период в живота си. Може би, докато аз съм била някъде и съм работила, моите съученици са имали друг тип тийнейджърство, който със сигурност също е бил страхотен, просто различен. Но не мисля, че това е минус.

Единственото, което виждам като негатив в началните години на моделската ми кариера, е, че бях много объркана по отношение на тяло и мерки. За да работиш като модел, трябва да си в определени мерки. Моето тяло е такова, че ако си хапвам, аз се пълня — не съм от тези, които са клечици. А в тийнейджърските години точно започваш да ставаш по-пухкава, гърди, дупе — тялото се оформя. Само че на мен това не ми вършеше работа тогава.

Имаше няколко години, в които правих страшни глупости с диети, с рязко отслабване, неядене и така нататък. Това го намирам за грешка, абсолютно, защото и до ден днешен влияе на някакви женски хормони и други неща. Отдавна не правя тези неща, разбира се. Това е може би най-големият негатив.

Индустрията не се интересува много от това как се чувстваш. Важно е да си в мерките. Разбира се, не трябва да се стига до крайности. Има проблем и в това, че аз съм 1.85, друго момиче е 1.78, но от нас се търсят едни и същи мерки. Това не е честно, защото защо и аз трябва да имам ханш 90 като нея? Но това е изискването на модната индустрия.

Знам, че има нездравословни практики. Аз съм ги виждала, живяла съм ги, знам как се държат определени хора. Но тук отново е много важно да имаш хора около себе си, които знаят как да те подкрепят. Аз съм плакала, крещяла съм, какво ли не съм правила, но имах късмет около мен да има по-големи момичета, съквартирантки, които в правилния момент да ми обяснят как всъщност стоят нещата, какво е добре да се направи и как може да се направи. Не всеки, за съжаление, има този късмет и тогава проблемите стигат до крайност.

Подготвям материал, свързан със „Сексът и градът“ и така наречените modelizers — мъже, които сякаш събират жени със статут „модел“, за да си вдигнат собствения статут. Кога погледът към една жена е възхищение и кога става опит за превръщането ѝ в обект?

Ако сме откровени, смятам, че нещата вървят ръка за ръка. Няма какво да се лъжем. Когато видиш един красив човек, независимо дали е жена или мъж, няма как да не реагираш. Ти го разглеждаш като обект, преди да го познаваш. Просто виждаш красив човек, който създава у теб емоция — възхищение, страст, възбуда, каквото и да е.

После идва другото. Едно е да гледаш, друго е да правиш неща, които не са ОК. Там според мен е границата. Границата е тънка, но доколкото е уважително към отсрещния човек, независимо от пола, е напълно нормално. Ние сме хора, виждаме с очите си и това създава емоция. Но пак казвам — има граници.

Имам чувството, че в днешно време, ако погледнеш някого по-продължително или изразиш възхищение, не знаеш дали ще срещнеш стена.

Това е друг проблем. Аз съм много за границите, но в същия момент гледам сегашните тийнейджъри и те нямат усещане за свалка, ако щеш. Не знаят как да общуват. Всичко е онлайн и много си личи, когато няма живо общуване.

Спомням си, когато бях тийнейджърка и пътувах, постоянно някой идваше, заговаряше те, случваше се нещо. Дори да не се случи нищо, мъжете бяха смели. Ако го отрежеш — ще го отрежеш, няма проблем. Докато сега всеки гледа лошо, всеки е много тежък. Другият се притеснява да не каже нещо, защото може да бъде осъден. И така се губи спонтанността.

Хората имаме нужда от емоция. А емоцията се създава, когато общуваме.

Явно app-овете са част от адаптацията към времето, в което живеем. Не знам. На мен много ми липсва живото общуване. Много ми е носталгично. Аз много обичам да наблюдавам хората. Понякога сядам на пейка и ми е хубаво да ги гледам и да си въобразявам някакви истории за всеки.

Като Кари Брадшоу?

Да! Като изляза някъде по заведение, понякога ми става мъчно. Гледаш жените — те седят, гледат така, че направо погледът им и мен ме стресира. Представям си, ако съм мъж, да отида да заговоря някоя. Това всъщност няма значение дали говорим за мъж-жена, мъж-мъж, жена-жена. Има тенденция на отдалечаване от най-елементарните комуникационни умения. Това е времето, в което живеем.

Когато една жена е красива, мислиш ли, че на хората им е по-трудно да я възприемат като сложна, умна, чувствителна, ранима?

Много често са ми задавали този въпрос — дали това, че си красива, ти помага или ти пречи. За едни хора съм красива, за други не съм, но в общия случай, чувствайки се като красива жена, до ден днешен не мога да кажа категорично. По-скоро със сигурност повече ми е помагало, особено ако трябва нещо да се свърши с мъже.

Но е имало моменти, особено когато завърших образованието си в Лондон и започнах да работя по специалността си, в които малко не ме приемаха насериозно. Бях свикнала по-лесно да ми се отварят врати, точно защото съм модел, защото съм красива, защото съм с дълги крака. Но когато започнах да работя и трябваше да използвам друг похват, а не красотата си, беше малко по-трудно, докато някой ме вземе насериозно.

Но пак се доказваш. Поработваш малко повече, за да се види, че не е само обвивка. И в момента, в който хората свикнат, че можеш да правиш X, Y, Z неща, това отново става плюс.

Какво би искала хората да разбират по-добре за жените, които работят с красотата си?

Може би, че почти сто процента от тях имат много други качества и интереси извън това, което се показва. Спомням си мои колежки модели — едната учеше медицина, представи си. Медицина, докато работеше и пътуваше. Друга говореше шест езика.

Това са неща, които никога няма да предположиш, когато видиш едно момиче на afterparty, след като е ходило примерно на Rick Owens и е отваряло шоу. Виждаш я на afterparty-то и си казваш: „Е, тази мацка е мега яка, забавлява се с къса рокля.“ Но в същото време тя прави още 15 хиляди неща.

Като цяло жените — не само моделите и хората в социалните мрежи — сме много комплексни същества и можем да multitask-ваме много повече. Жените особено са велики същества. Повечето правят по един трилион неща едновременно и имат много интересни интереси.

Затова съветвам по-скоро да задаваме повече въпроси, да комуникираме повече, за да стигнем до вътрешността на тези хора. Обикновено там е още по-красиво и още по-интересно от фасадата, която виждаме.

Как си представяш професионалния си път след раждането?

Представям си, че съм една cool mom. Със сигурност ще отделям време на детенцето, но не мисля да спра да работя. Просто смятам да адаптирам работните си ангажименти спрямо нуждите на моето дете, докато то има повече нужда от мен.

Нямам търпение да му покажа моя свят. Ще му чета приказки с моя живот. По-нататък нямам търпение той, защото е той, момче е, да стане част от моя живот и от живота на Сашо.

Аз съм израснала в семейство, в което майка ми винаги е говорила с мен като с възрастен. Разбира се, държала се е с мен и като с дете, но винаги ме е включвала в нейните активности, в нейната работа, обяснявала ми е какво, защо и как. Смятам да последвам нейния пример и да въведем новото човече в нашите животи. Ако нещо му стане интересно или по някакъв начин го насочи към неговия път — страхотно. Ако ли пък му е скучно, ще му намерим други занимания.

Какво искаш синът ти да знае за красотата?

Искам да има усет за нея. Не смятам, че мога да кажа: „Искам да знае това.“ Красотата не е наука. Искам да има усет за красотата и да я оценява по правилния начин — не само женската красота, а цялата красота на света.

На по-късен етап ми е много интересно как ще го възпитаме, какъв пример ще му дадем със Сашо за партньорските отношения и за всичко останало. Но да — искам да създам в него чувство и усет за красота.

Ако трябва с една дума да опишеш този етап от живота си в момента, коя би била тя?

Увеселителен парк.

Безкрайно цветно е, има много играчки, въртележки, колички, блъскаме се, падаме, ставаме. Много е цветно, отвсякъде нещо блести, нещо се случва, busy е, но пак е мега яко. Аз съм дете в увеселителен парк.

Край на разговора.

On a warm, sun-lit Istanbul morning, I boarded the first ferry to the Princes’ Islands with Madonna’s Confessions II in my headphones.

The city was slowly pulling away, the dance music was like coffee to my slightly frantic, under-slept soul - always running toward the next deadline - and the sea was doing what it usually does - looking calmer than any of us passengers.

Following the music's rhythm, movement, and release, we were approaching the first of the islands, and the album did something I was not prepared for.

It made me cry.

The music is not exactly sad, even though you can feel Madonna reflecting on themes that run through all our lives, but one track in particular - Fragile, a song she recorded while grieving the loss of her brother - made me remember my late father. I had not expected that, on a ferry, at 7.30 in the morning.

And Fragile made me remember something I return to every time I write about pop icons - the public image is never the whole story. Sometimes the most glittering surface is the threshold to something much more private.

That is where July begins for The Wonder Mag.

This month, the month we often proudly show off our perfectly-sculpted bodies on the beaches, The Wonder Mag is looking at the body, the image, and the icon, as the ways people become visible to the world, and the ways they remain unknowable even when everyone thinks they are looking directly at them.

The question first appeared when I was writing about Kylie Minogue and what happens when someone is loved as an image before they are understood as a person, but then this same question continued following me in each topic I was exploring this month.

It followed me into my interview with Bulgarian supermodel Ivelina Choeva, who over the years has appeared on the cover of Vogue Ukraine, graced the pages of major fashion publications, and worked with high-end brands like Fendi. Now expecting her first child, we talked pregnancy, the transformation of the body, the rhythm, and the self.

It followed me into fashion, where Bulgarian designer Stoyan Dimitrov spoke about corsets, beauty, and the invisible structures that still discipline the body. His point - that the modern corset is not always tied with ribbons anymore, but is made of filters, algorithms, and comparison - has stayed with me since.

It followed me into the second episode of Sex and the City, which revolves around “modelizers” - men who do not simply desire beautiful women, but collect the labels “model” and “beauty” as proof of their own importance.

It followed me into Madonna’s Confessions II, where the body is not neutral, but a symbol of scandal, power, weapon, and confession.

It followed me into Jennifer Lopez, and the impossible discipline of becoming J.Lo.

It followed me into women in media, and how they are praised for their brilliance until that brilliance becomes too inconvenient, and how they are invited into the frame until they start taking up too much of it.

So July is not just about beauty, but what beauty does once it enters the world.

How it is used, how it is sold, how it sells, how it protects, how it turns into careers, power, inheritance. It is about bodies as homes and histories, icons as people whose images have been loved, misunderstood, and projected onto by the rest of us.

Even nostalgia belongs here - the childhood shows we return to when what we want to feel is home, safety, and the memory of playing in our grandparents’ apartment where the air carries the smell of your favorite cake only your grandmother knew how to make.

We keep returning to images because they hold feeling - old clips we still watch online, fictional women we quote as if they raised us, imaginary companions we now build through technology. We keep looking because part of us still believe the surface will lead somewhere deeper.

That is why The Wonder Mag exists under its new name and new home. June did not go exactly as planned, as there was a migration of articles worth carrying into this new home, and too many pieces were left waiting in drafts.

This is where July begins.

From the ferry, from The Wonder Mag Island Bureau, from the music that was supposed to make me dance, but made me cry, from the new name, and from the old questions that refuse to leave -

To who gets seen. Who gets reduced. Who gets desired. Who gets to change. To age. To speak. To own the story.

Welcome to the first month of The Wonder Mag in its new home.

This month, we look again.

When we lose love, we often find ourselves. When we give up on love, however, do we grow beyond it? Lessons from ‘Sex and the City’.

When I first started this series of articles, “I couldn’t help but wonder”, back in 2024, I was writing about love from the outside.

It came mostly from observation, imagination, and very little lived experience. I wasn’t out as a gay man yet. I hadn’t truly dated. Lots of things I had to censor so my family wouldn’t understand or see something as gay — or at least too gay — until further notice.

Still, writing about love felt freeing and it came from the quiet hope that one day, it would all make sense.

Today, having come out in 2024, having had two serious relationships — one of which an engagement at that — and a few situationships, all I can say is: it doesn’t make sense at all.

But I’ve lived it.

And now, all those same questions Carrie Bradshaw asked and couldn’t help but wonder about, don’t feel like theory, observation, and hope. They’re personal. Some of them messy, some of them unbelievable. But they feel mine.

So now, in 2026, it’s time to give this series the relaunch it deserves — messy, raw, and unfiltered, because isn’t that what love is about?

For those of you who are new, here’s what we do:

We take the question that Carrie writes about, we look for the answers — if there are any — and we see if everything about relationships has changed over all these years since Sex and the City, the movies, and And Just Like That have been released… or whether we’re still stuck in the same patterns, desperately seeking comfort and validation.

Are we witnessing an evolution or just a more complicated version of the same old dance?

As Season 1, Episode 1 opens, we see that nothing truly new presents itself.

We still belong to the age of uninnocence, as Carrie describes it.

The episode opens with the story of a journalist from London, Elizabeth, who moves to New York and immediately meets a fabulous bachelor who seems promising — nothing like the other fish in the sea.

They have great dates and chemistry, there is potential, and just when everything starts to get serious, the fabulous bachelor ghosts Elizabeth before ghosting was even a term.

What’s different today?

We text. We connect. We share intimacy. We build something that feels mutual — and right when we are on the crest of the wave, we find ourselves ghosted.

At some point, I asked my mother whether ghosting existed in Bulgaria in the 90s.

She’s the perfect person to ask — she had various friend groups and lots of dating experience. I was convinced I was going to hear at least one fascinating story that I could share with you, but…

Nothing.

It turns out that Bulgarians in the 90s still had the dignity to name the problems before announcing the end of a relationship or a situationship. I am now wondering when Bulgarians picked up ghosting, so I’m definitely going to research that and share the results with you.

However, if we look at the current evidence on ghosting, most of us have been ghosted at least once — or have ghosted someone ourselves, or both.

Is it fear of attachment? Is it fear of responsibility?

Do we all safely assume that if we just leave without a word, we can come back at any point looking for comfort?

Whatever the reasons might be, they all welcome us back to the age of uninnocence when, as Carrie says…

“No one has breakfast at Tiffany’s and no one has affairs to remember. Instead, we have breakfast at 7 a.m. and affairs we try to forget as quickly as possible. Self-protection and closing the deal are paramount. Cupid has flown the co-op.”

And then she asks:

How the hell did we get into this mess?

Good question, Carrie.

It seems no one has learned from the past, and it seems things are actually… worse.

In the rush of our lives, we still have breakfast at 7 a.m. while scrolling through Google Calendar, dreading the hell of a day that’s lurking in the little multicolored tabs.

We proceed to going on social media to doomscroll a little, but just enough to start comparing ourselves to the people we follow, only to start beating ourselves up on why we don’t look a certain way or have a certain lifestyle.

And then, after social media, drumroll, we open dating apps. We begin swiping on Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, whatever, hoping to find the perfect match.

I’m wondering — if aliens were observing us, would they assume that the activity of finding a good match resembles the search for the freshest greens and veggies at the market?

Can you imagine? Social media, Tinder, and Bumble have become the new battlegrounds where we seek connections. Yet, despite the technological advancements, disappointment is just a swipe away when we are one step closer to saying — I found them.

And as the first episode unfolds, taking us on a walk around the question, why are there so many great unmarried women and no great unmarried men, it leads us to the main topic presented by Samantha:

“If you’re a successful saleswoman in the city, you have two choices. You can bang your head against the wall and try to find a relationship, or you can say screw it and just go out and have sex like a man.” (without feelings)

After a brief chat about guys that Samantha and Miranda have had sex with and a debate about whether they believe in love or not, led by Charlotte and Carrie, we see Carrie herself in her flat typing the question:

“Was it true? Were women in New York giving up on love and throttling up on power?“

But shaped by my attempt to make this whole thing more universal, I guess the question should instead sound more like:

Are men and women, gay, bi, or straight, giving up on love and throttling upon power?

This question is deep because it feels like in the past, love was about emotional fulfillment, but nowadays, it’s more about love turning into vulnerability and unpredictability. And at the same time, power has always been about focusing on control over your life, prioritizing career, independence, money, status, and self-protection, and most importantly, choosing agency over emotional risk.

Love and power are two different forces. They function differently, but can’t we stay powerful while choosing love?

Today, we all have our guards up, and we respond to affection differently, while power presents itself in various ways, such as:

• not texting first

• not over-investing too early

• walking away at the first red flag

• keeping options open

• saying “I’m focusing on myself”

Is that healthy, or is that actually fear?

Think about it. When we have two people doing the same things I just listed while trying to build some type of connection, is that connection even possible?

People say they want love, and yet they still expect it to fail.

So at the end, we stay guarded, we stay ironic, we stay without commitments longer while waiting, while wanting both deep connection and full autonomy. And when we face the moment of having to make a choice between the two, most of the times we protect autonomy first.

Which leads to a deeper spiral to the same pattern with someone else.

Something that I have observed has changed since the 90s, though, is Stanford’s, Carrie’s gay bestie, comment on the topic.

“I’m beginning to think the only place where one can still find love and romance is the gay community. It’s straight love that’s become closeted”.

Well, I for one can say this is no longer valid. As a gay man, I’ve observed that as we, gay people, might still be romantic and willing to show affection, it’s until most of the gay men get you under the sheets. Once their business over there is done, things are over and you will never see them again, although their promises might be different. That’s what most Grindr dates are like.

Now, as much as we love Samantha’s character, that symbolizes autonomy and empowerment, in order to become like her, we most probably must have gone through something very traumatic that has made us crave that level of control over the situation… to stay within our power and to purely enjoy sex as just… sex.

Later on in the series, even Samantha showed she was capable of having relationships, she was able to love, and she wanted a deeper connection.

So what? How can we stay in control and can we stay in control while being in love?

Many people are confident enough to say they have found the perfect formula. What we must be aware of, though, is that we will have to go through a lot to find our match, and Tinder won’t be really helpful when it comes to this, even if it’s already seen as the normal “place” to find someone to go on a date with.

In the meantime, can we find hope in “sex like a man” while we are looking for that connection that would allow us to stay “powerful”?

Well, Carrie did make her experiment of having sex like a man with an ex-boyfriend of hers, and she left “powerful, potent, and incredibly alive,” as she described, and she didn’t even wait for the poor guy to finish. Victory achieved. After she left the guy’s building, she even bumped into Mr. Big for the first time, who happened to become the love of her life later on in the series.

While this is a nice scenario to believe in, meeting the love of your life after having NSA sex with another person… are the feelings that Carrie mentioned — powerful, potent, and incredibly alive — enough for us nowadays?

Are we, in essence, trading genuine connection for momentary empowerment and pleasure?

Well, when it comes to Carrie, it proved totally pointless after she came across that ex of hers for the second time at a party, because the guy seemed happy and even relieved that Carrie finally understood what he wanted — no commitments.

And just like that, “powerful, potent, and incredibly alive” suddenly became just five meaningless words.

Why? Because it turns out that you have to change who you are even to just get laid. And frankly, after hearing this, Carrie was even wondering why she didn’t feel more in control.

I have been there, too. Sometimes I have felt very empowered (usually when seeking validation) and other times, I have felt terribly miserable after a hookup because of the connection fading away. Getting ghosted after sleeping in someone’s arms, after having a wonderful time together, not just wonderful sex, is far from empowering, especially when you feel so deep. Where do the smiles, the shared conversations, even the shared secrets go after a hookup?

Maybe that’s why after I ended my engagement, I haven’t been able to hook up. I guess I am just waiting for that meaningful connection, the one that will allow me to stay powerful in love and not consumed.

Is love the key?

When Mr. Big drove Carrie home after the party, he told her he wasn’t even half a drop like the men who had sex without feelings. When she asked him what was wrong with him, he told her that she had never been in love.

Can love truly be the key to overcoming disappointments and navigating the maze of modern dating?

Do we even realize how much the meaning of the phrase “falling in love” has changed over the years? Once, falling in love had been framed almost like an event — sudden, overwhelming, and a little out of your control. That’s why the verb to fall is so telling — the lack of control, the risk, the suddenness of it all.

Nowadays, we’ve built a whole vocabulary to delay that fall. Maybe because we fear the judgement of others, and maybe… even our own.

We’ve invented phrases like:

• I have a crush

• I like them

• I’m seeing someone

They all act as a buffer zone, while we still want the look across the room, the instant knowing, the electricity.

So we live in a contradiction — we live fast, but we label slowly.

Is love the feeling that will make us forget about all the disappointments? And can love slowly change somebody who doesn’t believe in its power?

I don’t know…

But there is certainly a glimmer of hope in this age of uninnocence.

Love.

Which leads me to wonder… maybe we stopped falling in love the moment we learned how hard it is to get back up. Or maybe we started calling the fall something else…

Until we’re sure it’s worth the landing.
And until we’re sure we stay in power…

An earlier version of this essay was originally published on I Couldn’t Help But Wonder on Medium. It now belongs to The Wonder Mag archive.

The Wonder Mag is an independent culture publication. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Sex and the City, HBO, Max, or Warner Bros. Discovery. References to television, film, and pop culture are used for commentary, criticism, and cultural analysis.

Originally written in May,

As summer approaches, the world of music is getting louder and louder.

Back in January, everything already looked mapped out. Tour announcements, ticket drops — a year of music was forming and taking shape.

However, now that we’re halfway through May, halfway through the year, more and more artists are announcing dates, extending tours, or returning to the stage entirely, and we’re left wondering:

What’s worth showing up for?

Which of these events, making people come together, will also make us vogue, strike a pose, move, and maybe, just maybe, remember why live music still matters?

With that in mind, here are the tours, residencies, and musical spectacles still worth your attention — and your money — before 2026 comes to an end.

ABBA — Voyage

@bostonglobeYou can dance, you can jive. It’s the spectacular almost-return of ABBA. The show, called ABBA Voyage, is thrilling. The avatars (let’s just get it over with and call them ABBAtars) that perform the 90-minute show, seven days a week, were created by 140 special effects wizards at George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic. For the full story head to Globe.com #ABBA #ABBAVoyage #SOS

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Although not an actual tour where you could see the artists performing in real life, ‘Voyage’ marks its fourth year in its base in London with dates throughout the entire year. The hologram experience backed by talented musicians promises to entertain the fans of the band with their greatest hits.

Ariana Grande — The Eternal Sunshine Tour

Announced after the release of the namesake album, ‘The Eternal Sunshine Tour’ marks Ariana Grande’s comeback to touring several years after the ‘Sweetener World Tour’ in 2019. Little is known about her upcoming trek aside from the dates and cities. The rest is mystery — we haven’t seen any parts of the setlist, nor have we seen almost any footage from the rehearsals, which means only one thing — something extraordinary is in the making.

Anastacia — Not That Kind: 25th Anniversary Tour

@sashveeee@Anastacia was actually one of my first ever concerts 20 years ago! 🥺 I took my mum tonight for her birthday 😌 #anastacia #notthatkindtour #imouttalove #london #thelondonpalladium #livemusic #concert #gig #professionalfangirl #girlinthepit

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After beginning in 2025, the ‘Not That Kind: 25th Anniversary Tour’ continues in 2026 with dates all around Europe. The global star Anastacia is expected to celebrate her artistry with her fans. Judging by the live album from last year’s tour, she is taking us on a walk through her biggest hits as well as her recent music.

Bad Bunny — Debí Tirar Más Fotos World Tour

@rubibarbaaBad bunny 29th show 😍 #badbunny #puertorico #puertorico🇵🇷 #choli #pr

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Following his successful residency in Puerto Rico and one of the most talked-about Super Bowl performances in recent years, Bad Bunny is continuing his ‘Debí Tirar Más Fotos World Tour’ in numerous countries in Europe, namely Spain, Portugal, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and more.

Backstreet Boys — Into the Homecoming

@ros_the_dayLast Winter 2026 Show - Backstreet Boys - I Want It That Way 📍Sphere Update: more shows this July added. Make sure to register on Ticketmaster for presale. #backstreetboys #foryoupagе #bsb #vegas #sphere @Backstreet Boys

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Not exactly a tour, but after the final show of the namesake residency in Vegas, the iconic boyband is expected to settle in Dusseldorf, Germany, where they are set to perform their golden hits along with their new music for a two-week residency. Few things unite millennials faster than hearing ‘I Want It That Way’ live.

Bon Jovi — Forever Tour

@bonjovi100 days till the Forever Tour kicks off 🎤 Who’s joining us at the first show at MSG?

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With concerts in New York and the UK, Bon Jovi is promoting ‘Forever’, blending classic rock nostalgia with newer material.

Bruno Mars — The Romantic Tour

@loloonstagevideosBRUNO MARS - THE ROMANTIC TOUR • 21/06/2026 #brunomars #theromantictour #brunomarsconcert #concerttok

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The global icon has headed all over North America and Europe to promote his latest album — The Romantic. He is performing in some of the world’s biggest stadiums and the public interest in his music is so high that he has announced multiple dates in each city due to the overwhelming demand.

BTS — BTS World Tour

@luisitorufino970@BTS #Mic_Drop BTS WORLD TOUR 'ARIRANG' IN MEXICO CITY

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Having started in April 2026, the K-pop global giants are continuing with their performances until March 2027. With concerts across Asia, North and South America, and Europe, the band continues bringing its music to audiences across nearly every continent.

Celine Dion — Celine Dion Paris 2026

@celinedionParis…are you ready? Register for pre-sale access by April 2 at CelineDion.com

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The highly-anticipated comeback of one of the biggest icons in music, Celine Dion, is official. She is returning to the spotlight of Europe’s largest venue — Paris La Defense Arena — for her 2026 residency. Ten dates have been announced so far from September 12 to October 17.

Doja Cat — Tour Ma Vie World Tour

@tourma_vie@Doja Cat performing “woman” on her #tourmavie! Coming to the UK and Europe soon! 📍 #Tour #fyp #DojaCat #concert

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Doja Cat is continuing the promotion of her latest album ‘Vie’ with shows in North and South America, and Europe. The last performance will be held at Madison Square Garden in New York.

Eros Ramazzotti — 2026 — Una storia importante World Tour

@rikkebreer#erosramazzotti #royalarena 4/3 2026 🥰 @Eros Ramazzotti

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Fans of Italian Music will be pleased to hear Eros Ramazzotti’s one-of-a-kind voice as he embarks on his first in 7 years world tour. There will be shows across North and South America, and Europe.

INNA — Echoes Tour

@lumeryyYou’ll hear why she doesn’t need autotune🫂💗 @INNA #echoestour#inna#innaconcert#babygirl

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The Romanian pop icon returns to the stage with the second leg of the ECHOES Tour.

Olivia Dean — The Art of Loving Live

@concertbecca @concertbecca ♬ original sound - Becca 🎤 🎫 🎸

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Olivia Dean’s music became part of millions of people’s feeds on social media last year, and the artist’s popularity skyrocketed. Olivia is set to promote her latest album ‘The Art of Loving’ with the namesake tour and she has shows across Europe, North America and Australia.

Pitbull — I’m Back Tour

@livenation@Pitbull’s “I’m Back” Tour with @Lil Jon started in West Palm Beach tonight and the crowd showed UP!🔥 #Pitbull #LilJon

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Mr. Worldwide is performing across North America and Europe, while celebrating some of his biggest hits, and he’s promising us a very hot summer.

Pussycat Dolls — PCD Forever Tour

@pussycatdollsIt’s been awhile... Meet your new obsession: “Club Song.” She’s out everywhere now 💋 And soon we’re bringing her to the stage along with all of your favorite PCD songs. The PCD FOREVER TOUR lands in North America, the UK & Europe this summer and fall. Pre-sale March 18th - sign up at the link in bio. General on sale March 20th at 10am local.

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Pussycat Dolls reunited as a trio earlier this year and announced their third world tour. Nicole Scherzinger, Kimberly Wyatt and Ashley Roberts, all part of the original girl group, begin their trek in California and conclude in the UK. Apparently, early-2000s pop nostalgia is still going strong.

Ricky Martin — Ricky Martin Live 2026

@tutepowerRicky Martin en La Paz BCS! Concierto espectacular - Música, Baile y muchas emociones ————- #RickyMartin #LaPazBCS #bajacaliforniasur #Concierto #paratiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

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One of the best-selling Latin artists and a crush of millions of people, Ricky Martin is going to have a busy European summer. The icon is set to perform in Italy, Germany, Turkey, Serbia, Croatia, and more.

Rod Stewart — One Last Time Tour

@attachant_tvRod Stewart performing “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” live during the One More Time Tour 2025 @sirrodstewart #rodstewart #dayathinkimsexy #onemoretimetour #attachant_tv #MA❌IMILIAN

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The music legend is extending his farewell tour with more dates in North America and is about to perform in Europe. There’s something emotional about seeing icons revisit the songs that shaped entire generations.

Shakira — Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran World Tour

@dioserpretzel_Shakira - Loca (Live In Copacabana/RJ) #Shakira #LMYNL #LMYNLWorldTour

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After multiple shows in North America, the record-breaking tour by the Colombian artist, Shakira, is coming to Europe where Shakira will be performing for an entire month in Spain.

The Weeknd — After Hours Till Dawn Tour

@2_cadenazJust buy the tickets #theweeknd #theweekndconcert #hurryuptomorrow #xotwod #starboy #metlife #ahtdtour

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The artist is bringing his tour to Europe this summer. Among the countries where he is set to perform are the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, France and Portugal.

Zayn — The Konnakol Tour

@zaynExcited to sing these new ones for you 🖤 KONNAKOL is out now! #newmusic

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Zayn Malik is about to embark on his biggest solo tour to date. Nine shows are set in the United Kingdom, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Peru.

And somehow, we’re still only halfway through the year…

Which means one thing — the soundtrack of 2026 would still have more surprises left.

An earlier version of this essay was originally published on I Couldn’t Help But Wonder on Medium. This version is now part of The Wonder Mag archive.

“Sometimes I will talk, sometimes I will sing, sometimes we will have fun, sometimes we will be sad. Hopefully there will be little sadness and more joy!” — says Semiramis Pekkan in one of her videos on YouTube.

Originally published in 2023.

Pekkan.

When you hear this surname in Turkey, it usually refers to two of the most iconic Turkish female performers ever. Ajda Pekkan and Semiramis Pekkan. Two sisters, two artists, two lives, two different kinds of glamour - and for me, two women who opened the door to Turkish music.

When people mention their names, you can see the love and the respect that fill their eyes.

Ajda and Semiramis Pekkan are two women that changed my life with their music. They are the ones that made me love with Turkish music. And that is why I called them “The Goddesses of Turkish Music”. And that is why I decided to pay homage to these incredible women with articles, dedicated to each of them.

And just like that… This first part belongs to Semiramis.

As I started listening to her music, I realized that I really wanted to get to know the person she is. I couldn’t help but wonder… how would I understand her interviews in Turkish? I know very, very little Turkish, and I’m really looking forward to mastering it when I move to Istanbul to study and live there in September, but obviously, it still isn’t September and my Turkish isn’t still good enough to understand her.

However, I found out that she has started uploading Q&A sessions on her official YouTube channel and every video has English captions. I felt such happiness when I discovered that and I watch every single video that’s being uploaded.

That’s also why most of the information that you’ll read here comes from Semiramis’s YouTube videos. Is there a more trustworthy source than Semiramis herself after all?

Semiramis Pekkan made her epic comeback this year at Haldun Dormen’s musical last year, after a long and needed break, and she made a promise in her first YouTube video that from now on she’ll be with us very often.

That’s how she actually re-released her iconic single ‘Bana Yalan Söylediler’ (‘They Lied to Me’) in two versions. I firstly discovered the remix and I remember that I played it at least 50 times that day.

I was fascinated to discover that initially she started out as an actress and it was exactly Haldun Dormen that discovered her talent. If it hadn’t been for him to see Pekkan’s potential, she would have never entered theatre. As a self-educated actress, she was really successful and achieving a lot in theatres in Ankara, but due to the hardships related to the low income, she felt obliged to quit playing in theatres:

“We were thinking of what we would have for dinner in the evening, there were times when I used to think about it. It was such a difficult time. That is how it was. I never thought of quitting theatre life, but I was obliged to quit.”

She turned to cinema after theatre and again she was successful, making 13–14 movies a year, but it was again the economic situation that led her on the way to music:

“The music offer came just at that time. Mr Ibrahim, the former owner of ‘Kervansaray’, told me to come over. He said: ‘Ms. Semiramis, I want you to sing at ‘Playboy Club’. He said he wanted me to be a rival to Ajda. I almost had a heart attack. It was like a joke.’

The money he offered her was enough to buy her first house and to live 4–5 years after that. But she had never sung before in her life. She immediately went to her sister, Ajda, to ask her what to do, who advised her to take the offer and to learn by heart a few songs. The other person that she met was again Haldun Dormen, who told her: “You can do it, sweetie.” With the support of these two people, the start of her musical career was set and a star was born!

Despite the desire of the journalists to set Semiramis and Ajda against each other, such thing never happened:

“I never wanted something like that. I decided to draw myself a completely different path. One of my decisions was to sing Turkish songs with a European orchestra. No one had done that before. It was a new experience. How could I be different? It was not possible for me to be a competitor of Ajda Pekkan — it was not possible then, it is also not possible today. We are two very different people. Two different talents, if I have any. I thought we had to have our two different ways back then. That is why the Turkish songs that I loved, which were the only ones I could sing those days, I decided to sing them with the orchestra. That is why nobody could compare me to someone — there was no place to compare. It was such a hit.”

Having only one month to prepare her performance at ‘Playboy Club’, the most elite nightclub at the time, she was so worried that:

“I was dying of fear so much that I bought my house from the advance given by Mr Ibrahim. The second thing I did was to buy a plane ticket to Italy. I decided to go to Rome. It was not clear why. At that time I knew neither Italian nor English properly. I wanted to escape. Probably I thought Italy seemed close by. I bought a one way ticket to Rome, I will never forget it. Can you imagine the degree of my fear.”

During her second ‘Playboy’ program she met her first husband, the journalist Ercüment Karacan, who was also the owner of ‘Milliyet’ newspaper. Meeting him, was the turning point in Semiramis’s life, as she says, because that’s when she fell in love for the first time. Out of her love for him, she decided that “it wouldn’t be right for a woman who is with someone like Ercüment to be on stage”. That was her own decision, unprovoked by no one else.

It was actually Ercüment himself that encouraged Semiramis to keep on recording and releasing music from 1969 to 1974.

Thus, she won several Golden Records and made songs that are still loved and relevant, touching the hearts of generations:

“What do I think now when I see they are listened to a lot? I am very happy, very proud. Being persistent is a good thing. It is very nice for me because I have only one son and one of the most important things for me is to leave good memories for him. I think I can do it. That is what I want to do today.”

After quitting music completely, she moved to London with her husband Ercüment. At that time she couldn’t speak English properly, but still she really wanted to start something new. That’s how she started a business in the fashion industry, setting out only with a single blouse and keeping in mind that fashion was something very close to her.

Opening her boutique in London, she had a partner, who knew 3 languages proficiently and at that time Semiramis started taking English speaking courses.

What’s incredibly interesting was that during this period, was that Semiramis herself brought many popular brands to Europe, including Versace.

“Versace used to make a brand called Genny. One day, as in every profession, there are such behind-the-scenes conversations, it was said that Versace, Genny’s designer, is doing something for himself. A new line, which we should definitely see. Of course, we went running. In Florence, there were shows at that time. There was a coat rack in a hotel room. We said where is Versace? They said here. Where? He was hiding behind the hangers. He was a very young and very shy boy. That is how we met him. And after that, I suppose he had already opened a couple of shops in the Far East. We walked together on the same path and Versace became Versace. Let’s say the first in Europe, if we consider England as Europe. I opened his first shop in Europe, yes.”

Semiramis opened Gianni Versace’s first shop in London, and he respected her so much that he also sent her his collections and asked her to wear all the pieces before the fashion shows.

“There was a big competition because I was also working with Gianfranco Ferre. He was a very good fashion designer, too. They would send the outfits before the fashion shows, but they wished that every single one of their pieces to be worn. I am not that kind of a person to be told what to do. And I have never worn them head to toe. Years later, Gianfranco Ferre said that he knew a lot of people in fashion, women who had jobs in fashion, but he did not know anyone like Semiramis because she never became a prisoner of any designer.”

What’s more — her style had been so unique and special that “Women’s Wear Daily” listed her along with Princess Diana in the top 10 of the 100 most stylish women in the world.

While living in UK, she’s been a mother to orphans, helping them graduate and sending them money. Thus, she changed their life for good, a change and gratitude that will always stay in the hearts of these children.

One of the worst events that marked her life, however, was the loss of her first son, the fruit of her love with Ercüment Karacan:

“May God forbid such a loss to any mother. One of the biggest losses in the world is the loss of a child for a mother. It is a very difficult period. To be able to overcome it and to overcome it healthily. I have dealt a lot with myself and researched a lot. And I think I pulled through it healthily. But of course it is something that you can never forget.”

“When someone’s pain is so fresh and someone comes and says to you, stop worrying, it will pass, it is impossible to understand. What is going to pass? A part of you is gone. It never passes. The pain of a mother losing her child never goes away, never. However, would you accept it? Would it be more comfortable to accept it over time? Yes, time is an important factor in understanding and going through some important moments.”

After a while and after the hardships of life, Ercüment and Semiramis put their marriage to an end:

“We were two people who loved each other very much. In other words, I do not believe that anyone in life loved me as much as Mr. Ercüment did. He loved me so much, and so did I. According to what I learned later, after these losses, serious losses, there are two ways ahead of us. One of them is to deal with the situation by embracing one another, the other is to break up. Unfortunately, we broke up. While I was dealing with everything in my own way, so was he doing, and we grew apart. We could not have known then what was wrong and what was right. But we parted very lovingly and in a great friendship. And may God have mercy on him, he was my best friend, he was my everything until he passed away.”

After divorcing her husband, she met the father of her second child whom she married. Being single for six months, she got 4 marriage proposals, but she preferred Mr Gulu Lalvani:

“Mr Gulu had also been married in the past and had two children. They are two beautiful children whom I feel like my own today. None of the others had a family yet. The reason I chose Mr. Gulu was because I thought he understood fatherhood and family better among those four people. And it is true, he is a very good father. I do not think I did wrong. I lost Emir (her first son), but he gave me Zoran (her second son).”

At that time, Ercüment wanted to meet Gulu, because he wanted to get to know the person that Semiramis was going to build a life with. Thus, the two men went to dinner together. After that, the first person that Semiramis phoned was Mr Ercüment, whose opinion was of great importance to her:

“He said: ‘My dear Semiramis, it is a very right decision, he is a very kind person. I can feel that. He is a very nice person but he has a lot to learn from you’. And he said: ‘All you have learned up until now’, that he had taught me, ‘you will be put in a position to give. But he is a very nice person, God willing, you will be very happy!’ And he told me to go ahead. How sweet!”

Gulu Lahvani, being a really successful businessman, was spending most of his time in Asia. Until then, Semiramis had lived in London, Los Angeles, spent a lot of time in France, but never in Asia. That’s how she started travelling to Hong Kong, China , Japan, Thailand, Singapore. During these years, she also gave birth to her son with Gulu.

And just like that, decades later, in 2022, at the age of 74, Semiramis put the beginning of a new chapter in her career in music:

“The reason why I took such a long break was to be able to spend time with my child. During my life with my first child, I did not have to work, but it was a period when I was working. Then I suffered a lot in my own heart, in my own soul, thinking I should have spent more time with him. Then, when I had my second child, may God give him a long life, I said never… It is my duty to raise this child. I am that kind of a person. And that is what I did.”

“For a long time, it never occurred to me to do something like this all over again. It never occurred to me. I say coincidence but… as you know nothing is a coincidence. It was a message sent to me from the universe, and I got that message. The reactions I got at the time I received it, those sincere articles, the articles sent to me were very, very touching. And I said, well, if I can, let’s do it. This came up at a very good period of my life.”

“I do not look at age. I do not look at life as age. Everyone, at any age can pursue everything they want, something they can do with love. It is that simple. So I said okay, since I received such a message, I am going ahead. Let’s see what will happen. Today, I return to myself, to do something with myself, to produce…”

For Semiramis, age does not have any significance and it is just a number:

“That is why I have never had a problem with age. I do not have a problem today, I also did not have yesterday. I was not upset for why I was young, I am not upset for why I am old. I am satisfied with myself. So if you love yourself, age does not matter.”

Working really hard and going every day to Moda, a beautiful and vivid district in Istanbul, to take singing lessons, Semiramis is excited to bring to light her upcoming projects that she describes as life-changing for her. And the first one — a remake of her iconic song ‘Nerdeysen’ (‘Wherever You Are’), a duet with Evrencan, is coming this Friday, 03.02.

I definitely cannot wait to see the new take on this favorite song of mine and to hear their mesmerizing voices, blending together beautifully.

And as Semiramis says in one of her last video — sometimes she’ll talk, sometimes she’ll sing, sometimes we’ll have fun, sometimes we’ll be sad.