22 Dec 2016

The Expats: the New York fashion blogger

From Afternoons, 3:23 pm on 22 December 2016

Isaac Hindin-Miller was the first New Zealander to ever be fired for writing a blog post, back in 2008. As it turned out, his story was correct and he won a payout, which he used to travel to New York.

"I had started my fashion blog to shine a light on what was really happening in the New Zealand fashion industry, everything going on in the magazines and the media was fluff. It was press releases reproduced and I thought there’s more to this industry than fluff."

Hindin-Miller got wind, when he was working for Urbus magazine, that ACP media was to shut down its website division and he blogged the information.

"The next day the CEO of ACP media was quoted in the paper as saying Isaac Hindin-Miller’s statements were defamatory and incorrect and so that day Urbus magazine brought me into the head office and said basically you’re fired."

When it turned out to be true, he brought a wrongful dismissal suit, which he subsequently won.

He then moved to New York.

"I moved to New York in 2011 my life-long dream was to write for the New York Times it just so happened that I met this guy and he hired me to write for the New York Times within one day of me arriving in New York - it was honestly like a fairy tale."

Although not a lucrative one.

"New York is an expensive place to live in and publications like the New York Times pay about $100 per story and they might hire you to write one story a week, and so there’s no way you can pay your rent doing things like that.

"So I had a following on my blog and I was encouraged to switch from writing as a journalist to doing personal style which is how all the young bloggers make their money."

Now Hindin-Miller does shoots for his blog and Instagram where he has 40,000 followers. He also DJs with his fiance   Jenny Albright and has just recorded an EP.