Meet The Influencer: Loots In Fashion

Who is Loots In Fashion?

Loots In Fashion is an alter ego I dreamt up while in my third year at university (4 years ago). Studying engineering, I felt like my creative side was slowly slipping away. I started my blog as a means to stay sane with my weird divided love towards the mechanical world and fashion. One year later I started to receive sponsors and now Loots In Fashion has grown into an advertising space where I get to contact brands that coincide with my blog aesthetic and collaborate on ways to portray a brand in a different way than your normal marketing schemes.

What does your typical day look like?

I have always been in a 'tug and push' war between engineering and fashion, at the moment engineering is my career and blogging my hobby/job on the side, considering I do only one blog post per week, which sounds like minimum work, nonetheless now for the first time I will share with you exactly the steps I take per day as blogger/engineer.

 So a typical day for me includes, waking up, going to the gym, heading to work at 10am (yes I am that lucky) where I design mechanical medical equipment and interior for ambulance helicopters. This can be very stressful and intense at times but ultimately I love it, it creates challenges for me which I need to keep me on my toes. Then I go home and relax because Monday's are for recovering from your weekend! ;) Then I slowly plan my look for the blog post which will follow that week. Tuesday, I wake up at 7 am do my over the top make-up and head out into the streets with my camera and camera stand and take my photos, all by myself. While every now and again a passerby will look at me with a allot off judgment expressed facially, as-if their thinking “damn millennials and their over the top selfies”. Once in a while, I will get external help from photographers based in Cape Town, when things just get too busy. Phenomenal photographers' I have worked with in the past include Disco Road, Anthea Addams and Basque Imagery.

After the photos are taken I will start to edit it piece by piece after work and by Thursday night write the blog post that goes with the photos and usually upload everything on Friday, depending on how much I went out during the week! ;)

What Is Your Life Mantra? 

It’s important to work hard towards your dreams but it is more important to enjoy the journey and go out and experience new things. I moved down from Pretoria at the beginning of last year, just to go out for one drink during the week in Cape Town serves as abundant creative power due to the fact that everything here is different for me. But no matter where you are this can be achieved, I strongly believe in the mantra of constantly pushing oneself out of your comfort zone in order to experience new things.  I desperately need this as I can come across as a bit shy in a group of new people or tend to get a bit of anxiety in certain situations. To avoid this sense of anxiety I constantly have to force myself into the unknown in order to build confidence in myself and then in return to push out that little voice that says “you can’t” which needs to be eliminated completely in order to achieve one's dreams.

I’m not sure what my dreams are anymore, in the past, it was to get my degree in engineering and move abroad to become a car designer for Ferrari.. :P. When I started to work as an engineer I was terribly frustrated as I worked in a place that I had absolutely no interest in, I stuck it out for a year and then finally moved to my new job which still isn’t car design. Last week I had to design helicopter seats for my eccentric Italian boss who wanted it to look like the seats of a Ferrari. So what I learned from this is if you have a set idea in your head of where you want to be, focus on it each and every day, and work towards it, while remembering that it is not going to happen in a year, or maybe two years, or in the way that you want it to happen, but if you stick to your dream it will happen, eventually. And the same applies to my blog I am now blogging for 4 years, so far I have worked with almost 70 brands in the past, where in my first year of blogging it was 0 brands and my second year maybe 5 brands. It is a slow ever growing, time-consuming process, but if you continue to work towards that idea in your head, bigger things will eventually happen. And when times get tough, remember where you came from, and the battles it took for you to be where you are now, this always keeps me going. 

 What kind of crossover do you see between your career as a mechanical engineer and fashion blogger?

None at all, but I will try to see the bigger picture. Sometimes my creative side helps me to design better “out of the box “products as an engineer. I have recently taken up sewing in order to make bags as an extra fun skill on the side. And from freaking out to how all the gears work together after removing the lid of my sewing machine, to the construction of putting different pieces together like a puzzle to make a bag, I must say, there was definitely a correlation between the two careers.;) 

What tunes are currently in your playlist?

Radiohead, Bonobo, Thee Oh Sees, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds 

Who are your fashion muses?

Margaret Zhang, Nikia Provenzano, Quigley 

Learn more about the lovely world of Loots In Fashion by visiting her stunning Instagram feed or Online Blog for more fashion inspiration! <3