Fiamma came from the middle of everything, not the beginning.
The writing started in college. So did the film work — real contacts, real rooms, a deal with Universal that got close before it fell apart. The film was uncastable. That is the honest reason. Not the writing, not the pitch, not the relationships. The material did not have a star attached and without a star it did not have a greenlight. You learn that lesson once and it stays.
So fashion became the decade where things actually closed. Not because the other work stopped — it never stopped — but because fashion was where the deals converted. Weeks, designers, editorial. Working with talented people at a high level. Exposure and reach and collaboration that teaches things no curriculum covers.
The books and the writing found their audience later, on their own terms. Fashion was where the craft got paid for in the meantime. That is not a failure story. That is how most creative careers actually move — sideways into what works while you keep building what you love.
The Real Curriculum
Not style. That is the thing outsiders misunderstand. Fashion teaches workflow.
A shoot has a brief, a team, a time constraint, and a vision that belongs to someone else — the designer, the brand, the editor. Your job is to execute that vision at the highest possible level without losing your own eye in the process. Do that for a decade and you understand something about production, about taste, about the gap between what someone imagines and what actually exists in front of a lens.
Naeem Khan was a real mentor. What he said that stuck: don't let anyone put you in a box. One line. Everything that comes after — the books, the games, the security work, the AI experiments, the Vietnam pulp, the erotica, the folk horror — is that lesson in action. The work looks scattered from the outside. It is not. It is one person who refused to be defined by the last thing they did.
Fashion came naturally, which is why the mentorship ran in both directions. Trusted by people at the top — not because of credentials but because of how you showed up and what you understood about the work. And then passing that forward to others coming up. That is how the good version of any industry actually functions: the people who were trusted become the people who do the trusting. The stories from those years are at Fiamma — the people, the work, what that world looked like from inside it.
Clinique taught something different: taste. Specifically, what to cut. Video editing for a brand at that level means constant decisions about what earns its place and what is only there because someone is attached to it. That discipline transfers to everything. Code, prose, game design, a prompt chain — the question is always the same. Does this earn its place or is it just comfortable?
The Cycles
Fashion people understand cycles in a way tech people mostly do not.
Everything comes back. Retro-future. Reinvention. The thing that was embarrassing twenty years ago is the reference point today. The silhouette that seemed finished reappears with different fabric and a different context and suddenly it is the conversation again. Fashion designers who survive multiple decades understand this not as nostalgia but as structural fact. The wheel turns. You position for where it is going, not where it has been.
That maps onto tech directly. The interfaces cycle. The aesthetics cycle. The business models cycle. What reads as innovation is often reinvention for an audience that did not see the first version. Knowing that changes how you build — you look for what is coming back around rather than only chasing what is new.
