Capsule #100 ft. Isabella Silvers

Hello!

Guys… it’s the 100th issue of Capsule!!! That’s wild. Thank you so much for reading the newsletter every week. It brings me a lot of joy putting it together for you, and even on weeks where my mind is blank or nothing feels right, completing this thing makes me proud and gives me a sense of purpose. Of course there is no Capsule without readers, so for you I am very grateful.

As you might expect, today’s issue is all about reaching this milestone and how it made me feel. Plus the usual bits of course: news worth seeing, a great Hot & Not from Isabella Silvers, and recs for the weekend ahead.

Thank you so much again for being here! I really do appreciate it.

Holly x

⋆ 🗞️ ₊˚⊹ ♡ Notes on 100 𓂃🖊

I’m writing to you from the Literary Café in Tufnell Park, London, where I’ve come to try and get my head down and write something about Capsule reaching 100 issues. A nice man has brought me a cup of tea with milk on the side, a vintage lamp is illuminating my table space, and some sort of slow, classical music is playing through a crackly stereo. The WiFi password is shared without asking, a QR code printed on a small piece of paper. I notice that the edges are cut by hand, and imagine this man cutting them to size for each table, an act of service actually quite uncommon when you think. The walls are a warm, cosy orange, and shelves are stacked with books, some almost tumbling off. In other words, the conditions for writing are, on paper, perfect.

I’d hoped to be feeling reflective, ready to write something a bit profound about reaching a milestone. Instead, it’s pouring with rain, I’m exhausted from a busy week (file me under “spinning plates”), and when I pause to think, all I can hear is I have nothing to say.

The more I interrogate this feeling, the more fitting it feels. First, because any time you put pressure on a situation, you increase the chance of it feeling bad. As the therapy proverb goes, “expectations are premeditated resentments.” Many of us know this all too well: it’s (partly) why we cry on our birthday, it’s why the first few days of a holiday can be difficult to enjoy, and why many people say they don’t like New Year’s Eve. There’s a great flip side, of course, like having the most fun on a spontaneous night out, or genuinely really enjoying an event you had been dreading (isn’t it funny how often “I don’t know anyone there!” becomes “I had such a good time…”). If the bar is low, it’s easier for you to exceed it.

The second reason this emotion feels apt for the 100 issue milestone is because it’s become a well-trodden path for me throughout the past two years of Capsule. Not every week, but often, I feel stuck. I look at my pages of ideas and think they all sound flimsy, or too obvious. I think about the big conversations of the week and decide I have nothing to add. Or I start writing, read it back later, and decide that this piece of work will be the one to uncover me as some sort of fraud, the wrong person in the wrong job.

The easiest way to mitigate these emotions is to do nothing. To not make plans for your birthday. To go with the flow with other people’s schedules. To not start a newsletter that binds you to a weekly publishing cadence. To not try anything. Without pressure or expectation, you’ll be free, right?

That’s a hard question to answer, but one I have some evidence to counter. I have experienced temporary bouts of what we might call freedom a few times in my life: the weeks after finishing my university exams, the first time I took a two-week holiday after starting work, floating in a lake in Berlin with my friend, a long weekend stretched out in front of us. These things are all objectively good, but the intensity of their high is carved out by the sacrifice or hard work around them. You don’t get the post-exam elation without the weeks of revision and sitting the tests, and without work, there is no holiday euphoria. Or I guess there is if you’re rich, but we’ve all seen the clips of Kylie Jenner having the best day ever on a trip to the grocery store.

When I started Capsule, I had this sense that something was missing. Millennial-era media was falling and had fallen (Man Repeller, Vice, Buzzfeed), and the next wave of short-form, creator-led videos pioneered by Gen Z felt fun but lacking some of the compassion or depth that magazine editorials gave us. I wanted to carve out a space for Zillennials stuck in the middle (and anyone else who would listen) to engage with the topics we love, anchored around pop culture and fashion, without spending our days endlessly scrolling and feeling worse for it.

Now this thing is established, the work is less about new beginnings and novelty. It’s actually a weekly commitment, one which requires me to be always-on, constantly making notes for ideas, hoarding a screenshots folder of over 10,000 images. And here’s the thing: although it feels impossible sometimes, this is not a bad thing. In fact it’s quite the opposite; I have something that gives me purpose, something that gives my life meaning. Committing to Capsule takes time from other potential avenues (and often costs me my Thursday nights), but the fulfilment generated in return allows me to enjoy the other parts of my life (and work) more.

100 issues later, I’m here to nudge you to start the thing you’ve been pondering. To have a go at something you’d love to be good at but feel like you never will. To sign up to the 12-week course that will mean sacrificing some other stuff but will make you proud and more confident in return. There are many reasons not to do things, and many of them out of our control, but I think a lot of the time, the main thing in the way is our own belief that we aren’t good enough. If that makes you feel something, just know that there are ways to building up the evidence bank you need to disprove it. You could be moments away from getting started.

If you are enjoying Capsule and want it to keep going, the best thing you could do is share it with a friend who might enjoy it. The hardest thing with a newsletter is discovery, so word of mouth and sharing with friends is a vital part of keeping it going. The next best thing you can do is to keep opening the email and clicking links — the Capsule stats are GOOD and we want to keep them that way so I can attract exciting things for us in the future.

And finally…

News from the Capsule universe you may have missed this week:

• Jonathan Anderson is officially head of all things Dior. A very busy man!

• I’m glad someone made this

• Primavera are owning the female headliner thing. Of course Chappell was in line do to the Apple dance

• Miley being relatable again

• Also: huge news…

• Cosmopolitan launched a wearable tech column (aka styling Oura rings with Miu Miu). Smart…

• In extremely normal news: you can now buy soap made with Sydney Sweeney’s actual bathwater. Gwyneth’s candle walked etc…

• If you love perfume and have some time to kill: Ethel Cain made a long video of her favourite fragrances

• Jack Antonoff is the new face of Louise Trotter’s Bottega Veneta

• Lana Del Rey once said, “Goddamn, man child.” Sabrina Carpenter is building on this great lyric tradition

• Kylie Jenner did what no celebrity ever does: shared her cosmetic surgery details

• I’m calling it: the best dressed man of the week

• And I really hope this Burberry campaign isn’t foreshadowing a muddy Glastonbury

This week, Isabella Silvers popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Isabella is a multi-award-winning freelance journalist and BAFTA Connect member. She is the founder of Mixed Messages, a Substack newsletter on mixed-race identity, and the host of A Suitable Book podcast. She is also a Global Ambassador for Graduate Fashion Foundation.

📺 Watching: Some fun, long interviews: Lorde on Therapuss with Jake Shane, HAIM chatting about Glastonbury and more with Nick Grimshaw (hello Patchwork?!), and Addison Rae with Zane Lowe.

📖 Reading: The Ayo Edebiri profile for WSJ magazine, and this interview with Olivia Dean for The File was really lovely. It’s about beauty and I was pulled in from the profound simplicity of this quote: “Beauty to me is all about feeling.” The photos are also gorgeous.

🎧 Listening to: ‘Nettles,’ the gorgeous new Ethel Cain single, the full Addison Rae album, Never Enough, the new Turnstile album, ‘Incomprehensible,’ the new Big Thief song, Little Simz on the Louis Theroux podcast, and more Miley, this time on the Every Single Album podcast. So much good stuff!!!

Elsa noticed that Google searches for “knitted flower bouquet” broke out in the past month, and “crochet flower bouquet” was the top-trending “pattern” searched in the past month. This is a neat example of a designer thing turned DIY: we saw crochet bouquets on the runway at Bottega Veneta, and now you can buy them on Camden Market (or make your own).

If you’d like to adopt Elsa or one of her friends, click here to learn more.

Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear how you’re finding Capsule - let me know here. And if you have a friend who might like it, do refer them! 🥺

See you next week 💋

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