It has been a fucking journey!

In 2010, I opened a blog from my bedroom in Tunis. It was called Pause Mode. I had absolutely no idea where it would take me, and looking back, I miss that audacity more than I can say — the kind that doesn't ask for permission, doesn't calculate the risk, just starts.

That blog eventually led to Sweet Wild Fashion, something I co-created with a close friend during our university years. We were bloggers first and foremost, and at some point, fueled by that same reckless energy, we launched a drop: T-shirts printed with Tunisian phrases, sold directly through the blog. We organized pop-ups that mixed fashion, music, and food long before anyone had started calling that kind of thing 'experiential.' We took it all very seriously, even if most of our best memories from that time involve laughing until we couldn't breathe. I'll be honest — every class we skipped for it was absolutely worth it.

Then came maft. First as a magazine, then as a creative bureau, then as a full startup. A startup that shaped me in ways I'm still unpacking, though not always in the gentlest of ways. Running alongside that was Moodha Okhra, an incubation program dedicated to sustainable fashion, through which we supported eleven Tunisian designers across two consecutive editions, one of which we launched in the middle of a global pandemic.

Then there was Osmose, a collective pop-up built around brands I deeply believe in, designed to prove that independent creators can come together without any of them losing what makes them unique. It's still very much alive, and the second edition is coming in June 2026.

Then academic research. Then the Safir Mediterranean Network. Then podcasts about fashion. I won't get into my other professional life here, the one where I step fully into strategy and business, because that's not what this space is for.

Karmossa Studio came later, launched in 2026, as part of a life I was deliberately rebuilding. But that's a story for another post.

It has been a hectic journey.

And somewhere inside all of that, there was burnout. There were disappointments I didn't see coming and some I probably should have. There were heartbreaks, the personal kind and the professional kind, and sometimes the two were impossible to separate. There were long stretches where I stopped buying colorful clothes entirely, because I no longer knew who I was getting dressed for. There were months of wearing nothing but black, and while I told myself at the time that it was an aesthetic conviction, I think I've been honest enough with myself since then to admit that creative and emotional grief have a way of making decisions for you, quietly, before you even notice they've stepped in. There were projects I abandoned. There were dreams I set down and didn't pick back up. There were versions of myself I no longer wear.

I'm not writing this to overshare. I'm writing it because it's true, and because this blog exists precisely to hold things without the pressure of an editorial line, without the performance of having it all figured out.

For twelve years, I built things for other people. Structures, programs, brand identities, entire ecosystems. I supported ambitious creators, institutions, and projects that inspired me deeply. I spent years finding the right words for what other people were making and wearing and dreaming about.

And all the while, I was getting dressed too, but I had stopped writing. Somewhere along the way, I lost my voice. Not dramatically, not all at once, but gradually, the way you lose something when you're too busy looking elsewhere. I'm here to find it again, slowly and without pressure.

I know that blogs, in the conventional sense, no longer make much cultural sense. I know the landscape has shifted completely since 2010. But I feel genuinely nostalgic for this format — for the length, for the intimacy, for the archive it builds over time — and I think that today, more than ever, I need a space where I can create a living record of my own memory and thinking, something I'll return to and keep feeding, something that belongs entirely to me.

I'm not coming back to blogging because blogs are having a comeback. Nobody announced that — that's just a story I'm telling myself, and I'm fine with it. I'm coming back because I need a place to think out loud, without strategy and without an audience to optimize for, without having to justify whether what I'm saying is sufficiently 'aligned with my personal brand.' That phrase, by the way, is one I've used professionally for years, and I mean it genuinely in those contexts, but here, it has no business showing up.

This blog is the one place where I get to be just me, with all of my contradictions fully intact. Not the consultant. Not the researcher. Not the founder. Just a woman who keeps reinventing herself, who still loves fashion with a depth that sometimes surprises even her, who has opinions that nobody asked for, and who has decided to write them down anyway.

What you'll find here will be unpredictable, and that's entirely by design. Some posts will be long and layered, the kind where I pull out my researcher's notes and follow an idea all the way to its edges. Others will be short and raw, a Tuesday morning observation, something I threw on without thinking and couldn't stop thinking about, a frustration that doesn't warrant a LinkedIn article but absolutely deserves to exist somewhere. There will be Tunisian fashion, and plenty beyond it. There will be criticism: sharp, informed, and entirely unsolicited. There will be documentation of the Mediterranean creative scene, questions I'm sitting with and not yet ready to answer, moments of pure and unqualified lightness. And sometimes, fashion will simply be the doorway into something else — into what it means to go through genuinely difficult things and still find yourself standing in front of a mirror every morning, deciding what to put on.

I don't know yet where any of this is headed. And honestly, that's the most exciting part.

In three weeks, I'll be in Marseille for the Saison Méditerranée 2026. I'll be there as a member of the Safir Mediterranean Network, as an alumnus of the Mediterranean Talents Academy, as a researcher working on the transition of fashion ecosystems toward sustainability, and as someone who has spent twelve years in Tunis watching what fashion can reveal about a place, an identity, and a particular moment in time.

I'll write from there. Letters from Marseille — long, personal, sitting somewhere between reportage and diary, without quite being either: the kind of writing I know how to do when I actually allow myself to.

But before that, I'm writing from here. From Tunis. From a room that feels, in the best possible way, a little like 2010.

Every chapter of my life has been a mue — a skin shed to make room for whoever comes next. This blog is called La Mue because that is precisely what is happening right now, in real time, whether I fully understand it yet or not.

I don't know which version of myself is on the other side of this.

But I am writing to find out.

— Meriem Aouadi