Announcement

I am writing (seriously) again!

tiny Pleasures will be returning on April 30th, 2026.

Since I announced tiny Pleasures two years ago through my Substack newsletter, Are you wearing that?, it has evolved alongside my personal and professional metamorphosis. It started as a print magazine in reaction to the growing plagiarism crisis on the Substack platform and a misguided romanticization of the analog age. Within months, I was overwhelmed with the financial responsibilities and conflicted about the magazine’s direction, although I continued working on it with the brilliant team I had assembled.

I had become weary and disillusioned about fashion and dressing up, and very quickly, I discovered that there was more to the dissonance than I had originally assumed. For most of my adult life, and especially after starting Are you wearing that?, I had viewed fashion as a supposed necessary evil I could manipulate. This manipulation started when I began my vintage shop. Like many of you, I fervently believed that the secondhand clothing market was the solution to addressing the vulturous fashion consumption practices of those of us in the Western Hemisphere. I ignorantly assumed that education, as well as aesthetic beauty, would be enough

Each web listing for my vintage goods included necessary garment measurements as well as educational materials explaining what each measurement meant for fit. Very soon, independent brands and larger conglomerates adopted this practice. I was convinced that this adoption would trigger a chain reaction, ultimately influencing the wasteful shopping habits and consumption traditions. This was not the case. I will not belabor you with the catastrophic details of how a capitalistic economy plundered the secondhand fashion market.

Most of us are aware of the phrase, “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism,” but very few of us apply it properly. Its common use is to excuse ghoulish hoarding and excess. I closed my vintage shop because I could no longer manipulate the beast. The education didn’t matter because most of the people who found my shop 18 months before I closed were only looking for exclusive garments. They couldn’t care less about what I had to say about preserving, mending, and repairing.

The pivot to writing was my most successful manipulation of this evil. But very quickly, the capitalist machine and its foot soldiers bulldozed through any of the goodwill that we might have amassed. This excerpt from the letter I sent to announce the end of my time on Substack succinctly illustrates what happened:

“While I have worked to address these contradictions in the topics I wrote about, it is also true that the stifling expectation to maintain momentum and ensure financial success encourages wearing clothes that captivate, ceaselessly recommending the never-before-seen and reviewing what else there is to buy. The audience is trapped in a vicious loop of inadequately matching these ideals, and is cursed with an unsated desire to identify with caricatures of both people and ideologies. The tacit agreement is to interact (flaunt) for visibility, entertain to hold your attention, and maybe even educate (if I got to it). The goal is spectacle for sensation and profit.”

I observed as the new fashion writing manufactured new fetishes:

• A mammoth-sized lust for the exclusive, never-before-seen, and never-before-worn vintage garments from the celebrity and upper middle class, which trickled down to the petite bourgeois and even working class groups.

• The moralization of obsessively considering fashion purchases.

• Existentially thinking about what to wear.

• Relying on the capitalist construct of style and fashion as a conduit for curating a self.

I could no longer manipulate fashion’s evils because of my knowledge of fashion’s crucial role in advancing the capitalist agenda. These realities orchestrated an all-consuming crisis of self. I could not unsee the carnage it had caused, and I even shouldered some of the blame, despite my good intentions. The weight of the cruelty of this industry enveloped me in its bosom and I was trapped. The desire for a break from all of it was palpable. I couldn’t produce anything meaningful for myself or anyone else until I attended to my personal devastation. I needed to first create a hospital environment for myself before I could offer any beauty.

***

As inhabitants of the west, we are all implicated to varying degrees. Conversations and an acknowledgement of these implications and contradictions have yet to produce fruitful actions. Most of us are convinced that the mere acknowledgement of our implication is enough to excuse wanton traditions. We know enough about the inhumane business of fashion. We have used this knowledge to devise deceitful “fixes” that consumers have gleefully accepted, while unsurprisingly manufacturing more carnage. 1000 new independent clothing brands have risen up to supposedly disrupt the fast fashion conglomerates only to produce more clothes every season than any of us can wear while charging exorbitantly for poorly constructed garments. We are yet to collectively address or fruitfully manage our implications, but at least we now have a supposedly sustainable 250% silk dress we spent 6 months thinking about that will allegedly resolve our wardrobe existentialism.

After leaving the platform in July, it took three more months to revisit tiny Pleasures as a viable outlet for a different kind of writing practice. It began with reorganizing my responsibilities. I asked myself what I wanted to be responsible for. I’d previously hoped to publish other writers so my voice wouldn’t take center stage but I do not have the capacity for the responsibility of such undertakings. But it was crucial to decenter the self. The answer was cocooned in a series of self-confrontations and lies that had assaulted my ego. My conclusions involved a personal, collective, and historical examination.

What did I want the writing to do?

• The work must offer usable truths with as little ceremony as possible.

• It must be written in accessible language and be affordable for working-class people to subscribe to.

• To approach beauty as a necessity instead of as a self-indulgence.

• To stoke imagination and to reflect a life worthy of living.

With this clear outline for what I wanted to be responsible as a writer who is publishing their works for a mass audience, a succinct definition for tiny Pleasures emerged.

tiny Pleasures is a meditative response rather than a reaction. It is a deviation from the prescribed life. It is a return to what we have lost and are in the process of losing. tiny Pleasures hopes to offer an alternative from everything asking you to upgrade and scale as though infinite growth is possible. Instead, I aim to improve on what is already available to me through understanding and familiarity. tiny Pleasures provides meaning through reeducation, rediscovery, recognition, and rememory.

I hope to use writing as a way to think about and irradiate the philosophical, historical, personal, political, and metaphysical through various contexts and references. tiny Pleasures hopes to provide something meaningful that might help sustain the life that has chosen to live.

tiny Pleasures offerings

tiny Pleasures is a monthly, issue-based online and email newsletter. In an effort to avoid cluttering inboxes, you’ll have an entire month to read tiny Pleasures before we send you the next offering. We suggest you read it on a screen larger than a cellphone. Bonus points if you print it out to read.

The first issue of tiny Pleasures will be free on our website. Additionally, to address sustained accessibility, tiny Pleasures will be entirely free to read every other month on the website and via email.

Each month, you can expect:

• One long-form article, essay, schema, interview, cultural criticism, or analysis, featuring more than one media form.

• Recurring columns

  • I couldn’t help but wonder: A Sex and the City column

  • What’s your occupation?: A column featuring interviews about work to help readers reimagine how we work.

  • On the fly: a column of short-form essays on varying topics

• tiny Media

  • A growing library of themed read, watch, and listen lists

tiny Pleasures is edited by Ella Ray. Writing and research by Subrina Heyink. Wu Tong is our web designer and manager.

You can support tiny Pleasures through a monthly subscription, a gift subscription, or with a one-time donation.