have i ever told you how this all started

it started with a jacket from all saints

i cant remember what that site was called, it was in the aughts around 2007 or 08 and you could put together outfits on it, sarah elizabeth has amazing layouts from it. you could browse and filter searches and i always had a hard time finding things on it i liked or would wear. then i found a draped leather jacket from all saints, which now is not impressive but this was before they had opened any outlets in the us or had a us url even and when they were still basically a rick owens knockoff brand. i didnt know yet about rick owens, so i didnt know there was more and better out there. i started rabbit holing and desperately searching through fashion blogs and tumblrs for the aesthetic i wanted that the all saints jacket inspired. i couldnt find anything and was frustrated. the aughts were peak fashion blogger but it all was very cute girls with owl accessories and modcloth aesthetic which i have had one night stands with but never an affair. i was living in los angeles at the time and this was all happening on my couch and my boyfriend at the time came in and asked why i looked so fussed, it’s because i know that there is more out there than lip service (no shade, i still have plenty) for people that wear exclusively black but arent club kid goths. i went to bed.

i dont know what time it was, i kept a really terrible sleep schedule then, so it could have been 4am or it could have been 1pm, but i woke up out of a dead sleep with the words haute macabre in my head. this isnt an exaggeration or hyperbole, i literally sat up in bed. i am a slow starter when it comes to wake up and usually need about an hour of laying there debating whether or not today is going to happen but i got up immediately and went straight to my computer and bought the domain. i remember i emailed erin, zoetica, and courtney riot, and i think gala darling, with ‘just bought hautemacabre.com, lets have some fun’

it started as a .wordpress because i didnt know how to do anything at all. my google reader (rip) began filling up with feeds from runway shows and i got deeper and deeper in. we built up a bunch of posts and then started posting to our suicide girls pages about it and that drew in the first round of hits. shortly after, coilhouse featured us, and it felt like we exploded. it was something like a thousand hits which seemed astronomical. at one point, the hm blog was pulling in over a million hits daily, but at that time, 1k in a day was massive. i was hitting refresh on the wordpress stats all day and couldnt believe it.

erin and i came up with different categories and the haute list, which was all of the readers’ favorite and our least favorite because it was specifically scheduled to go up once a week and our only real deadline so we always felt pressured. but everything else was coming so easily, and more over, it was fun. i was finally finding the designers that i knew were out there and erin was truly gifted at discoveries on etsy and indie brands. blogging on hm and free lancing at suicide girls were my full time jobs.

then i moved back to nyc and just … fell off. in retrospect i realize that i had fallen into a pretty bad depressive episode that lasted for well over a year. i tried to keep up the posts and it got harder to focus on anything that wasnt couch rotting, and erin really carried it those two or three years. thankfully i moved to new orleans and almost immediately snapped out of it and got back in the groove. a few years into living there i had a stack of stickers on me and was working in a restaurant (freelancing fizzled out, turns out cute girls in nyc dont care about getting on suicide girls), and gave one to the punk rock kitchen guy that was in his early twenties. he took it and was like oh sick this is that cool website and i was like wait what thats my site and neither of us could believe it, that i ran it or that he had heard of it.

anyway.

cut ahead another few years and a number of other sites started popping up that were similar in content. i didnt actually care very much until i realized they were using haute macabre as a reference guide of which brands to cold call for advertising and that got me fussed. by this time the blog had been going for at least six or seven years, maybe more, and i wanted to expand out. erin was really busy with her career (which is an entire other story that directly relates to hm that i will leave a footnote about), and knew of a few extremely talented writers from the hm community. i contacted them and all of a sudden had a group of contributing writers : maika, sarah elizabeth, and sonya vatomsky that brought in the most inspired content over the next few years. they truly shaped haute macabre from a fashion blog into a lifestyle & arts publication. we got even bigger and more traffic as it went.

the site started crashing a lot. an old friend of mine had been hosting it on his server for me for years and it could no longer handle the amount of traffic we were getting, so i moved it over to a new host. i started getting pretty bad imposter syndrome and wasnt producing anything that felt ‘authentic’ anymore, i was posting what i thought people wanted (the pressure of popularity, i know, poor me and my successful venture). the new writers were better writers than i was/am - that was fine, it was not about me being the best or anything like that. it was that i didnt feel like i had anything worthwhile to contribute anymore.

the tech side of everything had a lot of ups and downs, and to make a boring part of the story very short, it got super expensive. the site had never really pulled in any money, we’d get sponsored posts but it all went back in so there wasn’t ever any profit to be made. i was making up a wide difference in monthly fees out of pocket, and the site was still having a lot of tech issues. it was just too big: more than a decade’s worth of posts and images, it was massive. every time it crashed out it cost more and i started letting the repairs go and leaving it in maintenance mode. by this time, video had killed (massacred) the radio star with social media replacing blogs, and i was turning down advertisers because the traffic had dipped so drastically that i wasnt comfortable selling space that wouldnt likely be seen. when the pandemic hit, i started getting legal threats from photographers about reposting their images without permission (one photographer in particular was real persistant, sorry bro, your shit was all over tumblr. dont put something on the internet if you dont want people to see it), and i started pulling old posts. about a year later, i got another huge bill for server upgrades on top of the monthly charges and just kinda had it. it felt like i was paying for a storage unit. i emailed all the writers and told them i was closing it up and to pull whatever content of theirs that was there and to do whatever they wanted with it (it was always theirs, i never claimed copyright or ownership on anything that wasnt directly mine). it felt a bit full circle: i was back in los angeles on my boyfriend’s couch (different boyfriend, this one is for keeps), and cancelled the server account. i had the option to export the entire site to save and i just didnt. it wasnt because of laziness, it just felt like it was time to let it go. my only regret about it is that now when i think of a cool post i cant just go back and reference it or reshare, but thats ok. sometimes things just have to end in order for them to evolve.

anyway.

i wound up getting the jacket for xmas that year i first saw it and i still have it and now i have a few rick owens jackets, too. my entire life is entirely from haute macabre: my partner, brian, & his sister beth own black phoenix alchemy lab, who were hm’s very first advertiser & we have been collaborating on perfumes together since 2011. now bpal is my home & my family in every sense. my best friend, jamie, and i met through a mutual on instagram that followed hm. he and i have seen each other through heavens and hells and is someone i know i will always be able to depend on.

i still wear all black, because it wasn’t just a phase.

erin’s career footnote: her ex had a really great idea about a site to customize clothing, pants, specifically. erin and i were going to develop a hm clothing line on it. he started to learn flash to design the site, and so did she. they are both now extremely successful coders, and we still do not have pants.