Madeleine Rothery

Well it’s the last day of international endometriosis awareness month—and here is my whole story for @voguefrance I’d like to thank @julieleminor , who not only is a friend who helps me regularly manage endo, but who so preciously carried my story into French. I write about how I’ve come to prefer the word attunement to acceptance (which, for me, conjures images of defeat and little white flags). Attunement is listening, inquiry, curiosity, space, a caring response—for all textures of pain and emotion. Attunement, especially, doesn’t mute anger—healthy expression of anger is vital to human health. Women are rarely afforded this; we brace and corset ourselves into niceness, pleasantries, surfaces. When anger is held inward, it turns against the body—and is deeply detrimental to women’s health. Even my latest surgeon, a formidable endometriosis expert, told me he was angry. He had never seen this type of floating endometrioma, grown from pelvis to abdomen. Angry for me, angry for women—and determined to keep fighting. I write about how my clothing preferences have shifted to mirror this: towards Philo and Prada, whose designs allow me to live fully, generously in my body, emotions and all. A final note: this is all a work in progress. It has taken years of self-hatred, detachment, and harm to even begin this chapter. I have deep compassion for my younger selves. But the shame is no longer mine to carry—it belongs to the systems that failed, humiliated, and neglected me for 17 years.

It’s a tale as old as social media itself that we only post the glossy parts; I’ve felt strangely anxious about the warm, generous response to my story on @1granary about living with endometriosis and working in fashion. I think I’m still in partial denial—scarred by years of medical gaslighting, still wanting to believe I’m more than my endo, even though it dictates every moment of my emotional and bodily life. There’s also the sticky paradox that I exist within an industry that continues to perform on conforming, flattened images of women so foreign to the unruly, painful, cut-up one I live in. By the time a doctor finally listened to me, endo had claimed part of my intestines, bladder, uterosacral ligaments, ovaries, fallopian tubes, and appendix, requiring serious surgery to remove the lesions and parts of the affected organs. From then on, it’s been an endless carousel of more surgeries and doctors’ appointments, bed-ridden days of pain, paralysing fear that I might lose more of me with every twang of discomfort, and constant experimenting with diets, medications, everything. And ofc, the days when I just say fuck this all and call my mum for a good old cry. But this is all at the cost of my career. That being said, in a weird way I’m grateful for it. It’s given me compassion, a deep love for the fleshy body and complex human within—and I so fiercely believe we need to value the perspective that those of us with chronic illness and disability bring to this industry. Because really, we’re all only ever temporarily abled. And I want to thank the editors and PRs I work with who, despite all odds, have allowed me to carve out a fruitful career—through patience, grace, and the value they see in me. I can’t help but count my lucky stars that I get to work with such extraordinary humans. And for all my endo warriors: I hear you, I see you. I wish I could find a cure for this cruel, cruel disease—but in the meantime, I promise I’ll never, ever stop fighting for us.

For this year’s Met Gala, I was invited by @voguejapan to contribute a piece on the body as fashion’s oldest—and least understood—subject. The argument I kept circling was this: the best thing fashion has ever done is leave space. Not just in the cut, but in the conversation—that interstice between body and garment where the self actually lives. Where hunger lives, and pain, and pleasure, and the simple irreducible fact of being a person rather than an image. Schiaparelli understood it. Miyake, and now Satoshi Kondo, have built an entire philosophy around it. Kawakubo insisted on it so forcefully in her Spring/Summer 1997 collection—kidney-shaped pillows displacing volume to all the wrong places, questioning the body’s assumed shape—that Vogue and Elle photographed it with the pads removed. They closed the space she had cleaved open. Returned the body to its expected silhouette and pretended the conversation had never happened. It was, in the precise sense of the word, a betrayal. And yet here we are. Bodies growing thinner. The image growing more total. The space closing, again. What is lost when it closes is what Virginia Woolf would have recognised: a room of one’s own. The space in which a person remains a person—in which they can think, and feel, and act, and dissent. Fashion, at its best and rarest, has always known how to build that room. The question is whether we still want it to…. 

Thank you @saoricyoshida for the commission 🙏🤍💕

48 hours in Antwerp ringing in my birthday with Diamonds, Dries, and Disco (or Laughs, Love, and Levity). My fashion writing this year has largely centred around the continuum of care: how I care for myself, in order to care for my community. But as a society, we remain fixed at the surface of the skin—co-opting ancient spiritual practices that once tended toward the collective, and redirecting them toward the individual alone. Self-care, self-optimisation, self, self, self. (Which is funny, because the Buddhist and Hindu traditions behind so many modern wellness practices don’t reinforce the idea of a self but unsettle it—either dissolving it entirely, or expanding it into something closer to universal consciousness.) We’ve become toxically attached to convenience and cleanliness, cleaving life into ugly neat binaries: abled v. disabled, healthy v. sick, me v. them, self v. other. When really, life happens in the grey. As a recovering porous people-pleaser, I believe wholeheartedly in caring for oneself first. But our world is in desperate need of community and connection—offered with softness, with humanity, with openness. My birthday wish this year is to see more of this. Write a card to a friend for no reason except to tell them why you love them. Listen to a Metta meditation. Leave your phone at home and go for a walk. Adopt a Disco. Smile. Ah, so. This world can be so intensely beautiful—if only we are willing to feel beyond the edges of our own skin. 🙏

Worming about TZ with the best 🇹🇿 🫰 @shots_by_keneddy @chris_rodgers_on_safari @langettimatei2

I spoke with artist Meg Webster and Adrian Joffe about @commedesgarconsparfums latest collab with @diaartfoundation . I so love the concept of a scent embodying an institution… and how Webster, of course, took it one step further: considering what a scent can activate between two people, just as she always considers the place of people in reference to her installations. Perfume is such magic to me for that reason—you can spend as much time as you want perfecting all the different notes, but ultimately you can never control what it activates for a person; it’s a strange dimension where time, memory, smell, skin all collapse into the esoteric. I’ve been told that perfume is something that is to be forgone with endo as it can be an endocrine disruptor. But I will be never be able to let it go—it’s a morning ritual for me, akin to get dressed, as I pause in front of my collection of CDG perfumes and consider how I’m feeling, what I want to evoke that day. Today was a CDG Black Pepper day, though I can’t really explain why. It’s why I so admire the late Christian Astuguevielle, creative director of CDG Parfums from its inception, who also signed off on this Dia perfume. Because he played with scent in a way that makes you think and feel and contemplate—beyond just smelling nice. Anyway, thank you @khuncarla @adrianjoffe @commedesgarconsparfums for allowing me to continue to revel and play in your magical world!

Be Here, Now 🙏

Dries Van Noten, pure poetry 🌹🥀 snippets from Momu’s new Antwerp Six exhibition.

🦋 @claudiatwisk 🦋 suiting me up for PFW!! my big thoughts du jour are around how fashion can translate as care in a two-step process: to care for ourselves in order to tend to our community. I sadly think this last step is largely ignored—we consider clothing as a static ‘ours’ with little regard for the hands that brought us the clothing, and the life it could lead after us. It’s an act of care towards ourselves to wear garments that are created in respect, love, honour of the ecosystems in which they live. Fashion is relational, intentional, attentional at its best. That’s all to say, I feel very special to wear this suit made by Claudia—the love is palpable, from the beautiful textiles, her care and admiration for the people she works with, to how it makes me feel so strong and at ease in my body. Claudia is a dear friend, but honestly, really everyone needs a Claudia Twisk suit!! 📸 by another angel @nadiakrawiecka 💕💕💕

👼 @edward.cuming 👼 Outtake from Disco’s and my shoot for @ellejapan by @studio.moon

A funny, perhaps slightly embarrassing, fact about me is that I love The Moomins; I live constantly with a foot in their world. Especially when I’m sick or anxious, I tend to retreat into their magic; during my most recent surgery I, or friends, read the series to me (again). So it was a little quirk of the universe that my first trip post surgery was to Denmark 😂 back to Tove and her critters—AND back at long last to my CPHFW family. CPH reminds you that fashion is collaborative at its core, each season an expansion as new designers and voices are folded in—and this is what sustains creative risk. @isabella_rose_celeste and @jularozcs you guys are simply beyond—the magic you have woven through fabric and family at @cphfw is unlike anything else.

This is an interview I did with @annesofiemadsenstudio for @anothermagazine last year but the wisdom she shares is precious and timeless—I’ve kept them up my sleeve ever since 🤍 Fashion can be really tough—but what Sofie taught me is that vitality comes from protecting your creativity—there is no right way or one path through this industry. Do what you need to in order to hear your own voice. And sometimes that means stepping back, skipping a season, finding other ways to make money so the burden isn’t entirely placed on your creative output. Gosh without sounding like some self-help cult freak, she really did give me the courage to step back and put my health first. And well, I’m still here writing and finding more joy in it than ever. And after seeing her and @cclante show at @cphfw a few nights ago, I’d best believe they are too 🫶🏻 it is such a delight to watch designers actually enjoying the process; the wild richness craft that emerges when we hold awe for all the things that make us human.