Covid loosened the dress codes. Most industries aren’t strict anymore. But the loosening didn’t kill the rules of style, it just made them invisible, which made them sharper. When there’s no uniform, what you wear becomes a real signal: of taste, of self-respect, of the version of yourself you’ve decided to be that day.

Trends don’t matter here. What matters is what your style is saying about you before you’ve said anything. The silhouettes, the textures, the tailoring, the way it all sits against your body and the version of you you’re stepping into that day.

Has it ever happened to you that you walk into a room genuinely feeling good in what you’re wearing, your posture follows, and suddenly the whole interaction changes? There’s a different energy in your voice. People treat you differently. They look up when you speak, they ask for your input, they value what you say. You stand out, and not because you’re trying to. That’s your style doing the work of a first impression before you’ve said anything.

I’ve felt this in different rooms, different contexts. And how people respond shifts depending on what I’m wearing. Most people treat style as something shallow, a way to attract attention or perform. But style is a strategy. A way to boost your confidence, shift your energy, and change how you show up. It opens doors that weren’t there a moment before.

Some people will call this superficial. They’ll say it’s unfair that what you wear affects how seriously you’re taken. They’re not wrong, it is unfair. They’re just wrong that it doesn’t matter.

I look at style as a reflection of interior life. How your brain operates, what you value, how much you care about expressing yourself. Everything you own says something about who you are. And the reality is, people want to do business with, hire, and spend time around people who present themselves in alignment with who they actually are. Industry matters, of course. But the principle holds.

Style isn’t about being seen. It’s about owning who you’ve decided to be, and letting people meet that version of you on arrival.

What's Worth Your Attention

Worth sitting with

I was reading Emma Grede’s new book, Start With Yourself, and one of her reframes stayed with me. She pushes back on the idea of being grateful for what happened to you, because that framing makes it sound like life is something that happens to you. Which is false. We have control over our actions. We don’t have control over other people’s actions or beliefs.

What she’s pointing at, I think, is that gratitude on its own can quietly strip you of your own agency. The reframe she offers, and the one I’m sitting with this week:

Old thought: be grateful for what happened to you. New thought: feel proud of what you achieved.

Does success depend on other people? Of course it does. Nobody gets there alone. The collaborator, the introduction, the right call at the right moment, all of it counts. But here’s what the gratitude framing misses: the introduction only happens because you showed up. You made yourself visible. You took action. The people around you were the door. You walked through it. That’s not borrowed, that’s owned.

Things don’t land in your lap. And when they seem to, that’s the moment you have a choice: wait for it, or take action.

Worth Curating

A blazer chosen on purpose. Not the trending shape because it's trending, not the safe one because it's safe. Whatever cut your personality calls for, structured, relaxed, oversized, nipped, the point is that you chose it and it reads that way.

we’re obsessed with:

A pair of shoes you walk differently in. You know the ones. Whether it’s a flat with structure or a heel you’ve broken in, the right shoe changes your posture before you’ve taken three steps.

we’re obsessed with:

One signature piece you keep returning to. A coat, a watch, a particular shade of lipstick. Style isn’t novelty, it’s recognisability: the thing that makes a room remember you walked through it.

we’re obsessed with:

From the salon,

— Sabina

I’ll admit I love the sound of it. There’s something in delulu that suggests a real kind of internal confidence, the quiet certainty that you’re meant to do something. But never in the insult sense, and never in the faking sense. I’ve never believed in faking it till you make it. I believe in acting as if. That is a different thing entirely. Acting as if isn’t pretending. It’s expressing and empowering a future version of yourself into the present moment, even when the confidence isn’t fully there yet.

Which brings me to the concept that has quietly outlasted delulu: romanticising your life. It’s lasted because it’s backed by psychology. When things get messy, we romanticise, we find meaning, we find beauty in an ordinary moment despite its imperfections. The point was never to pretend everything is perfect. The point is to notice what’s good while the rest is still unfinished.

In positive psychology, there’s a name for this. The psychologist Fred Bryant calls it savouring: the capacity to attend to, appreciate, and, above all, enhance the positive experiences in our lives. Read that again: enhance. Savouring isn’t passive. It’s an active, intentional effort to make a good experience last.

Bryant’s model gives it three forms, three ways to practise it, starting now.

What's Worth Your Attention

Worth sitting with

Anticipation. Using your imagination to savour a moment before it arrives, letting yourself look forward to it, fully, rather than bracing for it.

Savouring the moment. Choosing one beautiful, meaningful thing in front of you and giving it your whole attention, as a way to block distractions.

Reminiscing. Returning to a moment after it’s passed. And here’s the part worth holding onto: sharing it amplifies it. The research is clear that telling a friend, writing it down, recalling it aloud reinforces the memory and deepens its impact. Savouring is rarely a solitary act.

This is what I mean when I talk about romanticising your life. Not the performance of a perfect one, but the discipline of noticing the meaningful one you’re already in. The details, the small things, the process itself. Because the ability to appreciate the journey, especially while it’s still messy, still incomplete, still not where you want it, is not separate from the outcome.

It’s part of how you get there.

Worth Curating

Objects for the practice of noticing, not to fill a moment but to make you feel it.

A candle with a memory attached. Scent is the most direct line to reminiscing: it returns you to a moment faster than any photograph. Choose one and burn it only in the evenings, or only on Sundays. The restraint is what makes it a ritual, not a habit.

Notes written by hand. Savouring deepens when you record it. A weighty notebook kept by the bed, not for productivity but for noting the one thing worth keeping from the day.

A good book. The kind you read slowly, on purpose.

From the salon,

— Sabina

From the moment we’re born, we accumulate. We grow up, we work, we buy, we upgrade: the wardrobe, the car, the apartment, the people we spend time with. Each phase asks for a different version of us, and the objects we choose along the way become part of the record. Past experiences don’t disappear; they add context and colour to who we’re becoming.

Psychology has a name for this. In 1988, Russell Belk introduced the extended self theory, the idea that what you own becomes an extension of your identity. Not just what you wear, but where you live, what you drive, what you keep on your desk. Possessions are instrumental, especially in transitional phases.

But there’s a condition. A separate study, Adam & Galinsky’s enclothed cognition, found that objects only shift behaviour when you believe in the meaning behind them. Put on a blazer expecting nothing, and nothing happens. Put on a blazer associated with authority, focus, the version of yourself you’re stepping into, and your behaviour follows.

Extend that beyond clothes, and the principle holds. The object works when the meaning is there. Without meaning, it’s just inventory.

This is where emulation falls apart. When the woman you admire buys a mini Kelly, she’s buying a marker: a milestone, a turning point, a private agreement with herself. The object is the receipt. If you buy the same bag without the same meaning, you haven’t bridged the gap between where she is and where you are. You’ve bought a prop.

The symbol isn’t the shortcut. The meaning is.

What's Worth Your Attention

Worth sitting with

Bridging the gap requires knowing who you are and where you’re going. Three questions worth holding:

What am I actually admiring? When you look at the woman whose life you want, name the specific thing. Is it the bag, or what the bag represents? The home, or the discernment that built it? The wardrobe, or the clarity behind every piece in it?

Which symbols are mine? Borrowed symbols rarely fit. The objects that work for you are the ones that carry meaning you’ve defined: a catalyst for the woman you’re choosing to become, not a costume of someone else.

What does the meaning ask of me? The research only takes you halfway. The blazer doesn’t change you on its own. The work, the habits, the mindset, the practice is still the work.

Next Sunday: the objects worth owning when the meaning is already yours.

Until then, what’s on your desk, in your closet, on your shelf that you actually chose? Sit with the answer.

From the salon,

— Sabina

This week, I kept running into the same conversation about “the millennial crisis,” about “becoming,” about things being “in progress.”

The dynamics have shifted for us. Millennials were taught to follow a blueprint: school, university, job, marriage, kids, loyalty. The promise was that education and fitting in were enough, that the blueprint was the success. That promise no longer holds.

We’re what Marie Forleo calls being “in the messy middle of a becoming.” We’re reaching for a different kind of life, one where purpose and fulfillment thrive, where we live on our own terms.

But here’s the question I’ve been sitting with: is the messy middle keeping us stuck?

Because in transformation, doubt does what it’s designed to do. Your brain’s job is to keep you safe, and the unknown is, by definition, unsafe. The result is a low hum of resistance disguised as caution, of hesitation disguised as preparation.

So this week, let’s work through it together.

What's Worth Your Attention

Worth sitting with

Three frameworks I came back to this week, each one a tool for the messy middle.

Identify your inner critic, and recognize it isn’t you. When that voice shows up, ask: what values is it holding onto? Then ask: what are mine? The gap between the two is the gap you’re being asked not to fall into. The critic is loudest when you’re closest to becoming someone she doesn’t recognize.

Experience doesn’t equal confidence. The education system trained us to prepare endlessly: to credential, to certify, to get ready. Learning matters, and there are fields where practice is non-negotiable. But most of us aren’t there. Most of us are exhausting the world’s knowledge as a strategy to avoid starting. Permission slip: begin imperfectly. Things settle as you go.

Connect to your inner mentor. On Aspire with Emma Grede, Tara Mohr offered this exercise: close your eyes and picture yourself twenty or thirty years from now. Notice how she moves. Her energy. What would she tell you? How would she approach this? Your inner mentor already exists. The work is tapping in.

And the through-line, from Barbara Corcoran: build toward the vision of yourself. A business plan will change. A market will change. Even your goals will change. But the image of who you’re becoming.. that one’s yours. Nobody can edit it. That’s your North Star.

Worth filtering

In the messy middle, trends are seductive, they offer the appearance of certainty when you have none. Here’s what’s emerging, and how I’m holding it.

Printmaxxing - the death of quiet luxury. The quiet luxury era trained women to disappear into beige. Printmaxxing is the rebellion: layered prints, clashing patterns, individuality as the new flex. The thesis is simple: restraint isn’t taste anymore, it’s camouflage. After years of “clean girl” minimalism, the pendulum is swinging toward character, toward 2000s nostalgia, toward bold textures and statement jewelry.

But here’s the filter: trend-following is just a different kind of conformity. Quiet luxury asked us to disappear. Printmaxxing asks us to perform. The self-defined woman doesn’t choose between them, she chooses what makes her her, then wears it on purpose.

Everything-maxxing. Why are we obsessed with maxxing? For the same reason we’ve always chased more: levelling up. Different language, same impulse.

But I keep coming back to an idea I heard recently: not every year is a year for results. Some years are for learning. Some are for trying. Some are for the unglamorous work that produces the outcomes you’ll celebrate later.

So the question isn’t what should I be maxxing. The question is: what season am I in, and where does my energy actually need to go? Relationships? Style? A career pivot? A creative practice? Maxxing without that clarity is just optimization in costume.

Worth Curating

What you surround yourself with in this season matters. Two finds worth your attention this week.

Bathroom personality. Why does the bathroom get less attention than the rest of the home? It’s where many of us start the day; where I do my makeup, take the everything-shower, run a bath when the week has been too much. The bathroom has been treated as functional infrastructure, but the modern read is different: the bathroom as wellness corner, as private spa, as a room with its own mood.

If your home is a sanctuary, every room earns the right to express something. The bathroom included.

The Vintage Edit. Curating pieces and giving them a second life, with intention, is its own kind of luxury.

I spent the day at the Sunday Variety Market at St. Lawrence, and it was a portal. Pieces from the 1940s and the 1970s, sitting next to each other, telling completely different stories about how women dressed and what they valued. I came home with a few accessories that felt right for the season I’m in, pieces that lean into self-expression rather than performance.

From the salon,

— Sabina

The moment fashion lovers have waited two decades for arrived this weekend: The Devil Wears Prada 2.

The storyline has evolved to reflect a new reality (spoiler ahead): tech is reshaping the dynamics of fashion. The plot twist proposes that culture “must be left behind” — evolved and replaced by AI in the name of keeping up. “You go with what life throws at you.”

I’m a proponent of AI as a tool — but dismissing what shaped us to this point is where I part ways. The film served looks, delivered nostalgia, and left me with something more important: the conviction that the future of taste remains human.

I recognize what AI offers. But we are the taste-makers. We create meaning, carry emotion, cultivate culture, build community. Now, more than ever, self-expression is the advantage in a world of sameness. Your identity is brought to life through what you wear, how you live, where you spend your time, and who you spend it with.

That’s the work at the core of Modern Socialites: curating lifestyle with intention. Every week, I bring you the ideas, people, and places shaping culture — and help you close the gap between who you are and how you live.

So, let’s get into it.

What's Worth Your Attention

The Fragrance

Scent is one of the most underrated tools of self-expression — it shapes how you show up before you say a word. Brands like Phlur treat fragrance as an extension of personal style, building scents like Father Figure around a persona rather than a note. Like fashion, fragrance evokes mood — and the notes you gravitate toward say something about how you want to be perceived.

A quick primer on scent families:

• Floral — romantic, feminine, classic. Rose, jasmine, peony. Reads as soft and approachable. (Chanel Chance lives here.)

• Woody — grounded, warm, confident. Sandalwood, cedar, vetiver. Reads as quietly powerful. (YSL Libre, with its lavender-cedar core.)

• Musky / Amber — sensual, intimate, lingering. Amber, musk, vanilla. Reads as magnetic. (Chanel Coco Noir and Phlur Father Figure both play here.)

• Citrus / Fresh — energetic, clean, modern. Bergamot, neroli, grapefruit. Reads as effortless.

• Oriental / Spicy — bold, complex, evening-coded. Incense, cardamom, oud. Reads as deliberate.

The self-defined woman doesn’t pick one lane — she has a wardrobe of scents, the way she has a wardrobe of clothes.

What I’m wearing this season:

• Chanel Chance — light, fresh, quietly empowering

• Chanel Coco Noir — sultry, flirtatious, a date-night signature

• Phlur Father Figure — sensual, modern, magnetic

• YSL Libre — confident, grounded, signature-worthy

The Spring Edit

There’s an “anti-trend” trend in the air — essentially, a return to basics. I’m taking it further: basics, elevated through accessories that carry personality.

The Muse

Alex Eagle, Creative Director.

Alex Eagle is the kind of creative director whose work refuses to sit in one category. Her shop, her interiors, her personal style, her curated objects — they all speak the same language. She's built a world where fashion, home, and lifestyle aren't separate departments but expressions of one coherent point of view. That's what makes her worth studying: not any single piece she puts out, but the consistency of taste across all of them.

The Idea

Modernism as a mindset.

“You’re a collector,” Alex Eagle observes in a recent Vogue piece, framing modernism as “a mindset” and style as “thoughtful accumulation.”

Modern Socialites was built on the same foundation. My work is to simplify and curate with intention, so that self-defined women can build a lifestyle at the intersection of identity and expression. I’m redefining what it means to be a socialite today.

The piece captures something I believe deeply: style, objects, and spaces are interconnected. They shape one another. And they shape you.

From the salon,

— Sabina