It’s a grey day in London when I talk to Jessie Bush, the sky’s heavy clouds threatening rain. The style photographer and influencer better known by her moniker We The People is watching the weather from her living room window but inside, it’s even darker.
“I’m just having one of those ridiculous mornings when everything’s a shitstorm,” she says. Right on cue, the connection of our Zoom call begins to waver. “The power’s out,” she confirms, before continuing to break up. “Bedroom rug… New Zealand wool… dog’s thrown up… apologise if… hotspotting…” Silence, then: “Back?” She cuts out completely, so we agree via email to try again soon.
FQ has spent almost six months courting Bush for this interview, so I worry we’ll never be reconnected; however, true to her word, 10 minutes later, she’s back (thanks to her husband, photographer Sam Flaherty, getting the Wi-fi connection working again), her still-strong Kiwi accent as clear as a bell.
“You’d think it’d be more diluted by now,” she says. “When I’m talking to fellow Kiwis, I speak like this, but when I’m talking to someone else, I round out my vowels so they understand me, just to be considerate. But, yes, the Kiwi shines through.”
One of a kind
Bush looks very familiar. In fact, seeing her sitting on her cream coloured armchair makes me feel oddly at home, as though I’m visiting a friend. I’ve seen that room and that chair before; I’ve seen her wearing that red-and-pink checked jumper (which today hugs her burgeoning baby bump) and know it’s one she designed with London-based brand Kitri. I know she’s pregnant before she tells me she’s 33 weeks along, that her husband has a penchant for tattoos and that they have a border collie called Olive. I know she’s particularly fond of a certain pair of blue Manolo Blahnik heels and a swipe of red lipstick, and that she adores antique shopping. I know all this thanks to Instagram.
The effortlessly beautiful 32-year-old is quick to tell me that although she regularly posts on social media, it’s only a snapshot of her life. “I’m just showing a sliver of it. Like I said, the dog vomited on our rug this morning, but I don’t bother showing that! People gripe about only showing a highlights reel, but everyone uses social media for different purposes and mine is specifically for work — it’s my job.”
Bush is one of New Zealand’s most sought-after fashion-influencer exports. With 549,000 followers on Instagram alone, her aesthetic is adored and emulated, plus her posts often come with captions infused with a charming Kiwi casualness that’s proved to be a hit.
It’s the work she does on Instagram that pays her bills. On her grid, you’ll find her modelling her favourite outfits in a relatable way, predominantly at her home and on the streets of London. She and Flaherty know what makes a great backdrop, how to get the lighting right and how to create a visually appealing composition.
The connection between the two creatives steers the images away from being too contrived, and gives them a sense of naturalness and ease. Brands have been quick to get on board, and Bush has already worked with a long list, including but certainly not limited to Bulgari, Jimmy Choo, Coach, Longchamp, Missoma, Net-A-Porter and Victoria Beckham.
What also sets Bush apart from others is her unique style. Casual cool meets eclectic, it often includes pops of colour and unexpected pairings; she’ll team a dazzling sequinned Retrofête mini-dress with chunky Prada boots, or pink-and-white flares with a white tank and a camel coat. More recently, she’s been opting for bump-friendly finds, like her knitted Christopher Esber dress with Bottega Veneta boots. I don’t know the stats, but I’d hazard a guess that when she wears something, thousands flock to buy it.
Even if it we do see only a sliver of Bush’s life on Instagram, it looks like a pretty damn good one. She’s lived in various places in Europe and often reports for duty in exotic locations — Spain’s Mallorca, Italy’s Puglia, the island of Mauritius. She even made Cornwall look like a desirable holiday destination when she and Flaherty were tripping around England during London’s short-lived summer.
Perhaps it’s understandable that envy gets the better of some online commenters. Recently I’ve noticed more and more mean messages cropping up on her account —someone telling her she looks old, another saying she “better be careful” when she posted a photo of her bump. But for Bush, it’s water off a duck’s back.
“The mean comments started to crop up during the pandemic — I really noticed people had way too much time on their hands,” she says. “Unfortunately for them, so did I, so they’d write quite a pissy comment and I’d say, ‘Hey man, don’t be a dick’. It doesn’t actually affect me, though — I don’t really take it to heart.”
Home-grown success
Like many in lockdowns all over the world, when the pandemic came to London, a lot of Bush’s work was put on hold and she had to change tack. After she shot and modelled for the campaign for Kitri (a digitally focused direct-to-consumer brand that produces pieces in limited quantities), something she wouldn’t ordinarily do, people started referring to it as ‘the Jessie Bush collection’. One dress in particular attracted a 500-strong waiting list, such successes leading Bush to collaborate with the brand again, designing a collection for Spring 2021.
“It was a collab in the truest sense because they really let me lead with what I thought was going to work design-wise,” she says. “I don’t actually have any fashion-production experience, so they taught me so much about what’s actually viable, particularly because of their business model where they’re looking for existing stock fabric. Working with them has been a saving grace over this past year and a half.”
The campaign was shot at Bush’s home, and became another success. The Telegraph wrote an article that reported a 3000-person waiting list for a blouse that sold out in 20 minutes, and referred to Bush as “the woman who can sell hundreds of dresses from her couch” and “the face of stay-at-home style”.
In true New Zealand fashion, Bush is nonplussed about it. “It was weird to have it worded like that. As a Kiwi, I was like, ‘Am I!’? The article reminded me that we’d done something cool [during lockdown] and I wasn’t just this girl taking pictures in her living room.”
People pleaser
Bush grew up in Blenheim, population about 28,000, and it’s not lost on her that her followers number many times that. She always loved fashion and recalls buying Fashion Quarterly religiously, sometimes two copies at a time — one to keep and one to cut up for her diary and bedroom wall. From the ages of 13 to 18, her ultimate goal was to work for a magazine, and she mostly shopped second-hand, “trying to find and style things like in a magazine”.
After Bush had completed a communications degree in Wellington, where she also worked several jobs so she could buy “whatever clothes [she] couldn’t really afford”, Flaherty suggested she start a street-style blog. Then, in around 2010, she was invited to shoot street style at New Zealand Fashion Week. There, she met some women who worked in publishing in Sydney and asked if she’d consider moving there. Without a second thought, the couple used their overdrafts to fund the trip. Initially, Bush worked in PR, but she subsequently landed street-style columns in Vogue and Grazia. Eventually, she moved to London with Flaherty to work for Condé Nast, shooting for a host of the company’s titles and travelling to international fashion shows to snap the women attending them.
“It wasn’t as glamorous as it sounds,” she says of this role. “They didn’t even pay me enough to travel to all four cities [for Fashion Week]. I stayed in these grim Airbnbs and would shoot all day, then watch as everyone went off to the parties at night, while I’d still be sitting in this crappy Airbnb processing the images before the next day because all the magazines needed their galleries!”
Bush continued shooting women going to fashion shows for about three seasons, then decided to get in front of the camera herself. Perhaps that’s what’s so appealing about her — she’s genuinely done the hard graft and knows her stuff.
“In those initial days of swapping from sharing imagery of these beautifully poised women going to shows to [posting photos of] myself, it was like heart palpitations. I was like, ‘Don’t put yourself on the internet, no one wants to see that’.”
But everyone did, I venture. “Yeah!” she laughs. “But I’m still very hesitant. You’ll see I don’t talk to camera, which is funny because I’m very talkative. It’s the narration of our lives that I still find a really odd phenomenon.”
That’s one of the new things I learn about Bush during our interview: she likes to talk — a lot. Our conversation continues for almost two hours, without a doubt the longest interview I’ve ever conducted. Even the power has come back on by the time we’re finished. We’ve discussed how she’ll navigate social media with a baby, how being sent unsolicited press gifts incites panic about consumerism, and how strangers approach her and want to be friends — but when I notice her starting to shift uncomfortably in her armchair, I apologise for taking up so much of her time. She’s quick to take the blame, saying she’s always “yabbering too much”. She does have to go, though, she tells me. It’s London Fashion Week, and although it’s not as hectic as usual — a sign of the post-lockdown times and the fact she’s winding down her workload in order to get ready for the baby — she has some showroom appointments to get to.
A day later, I see an image on Instagram of her in a grey coat, a blue-and-white striped shirt, jeans and the aforementioned blue heels, with London’s iconic red buses behind her. She captions it: “The return of Fashion Week IRL”, and people immediately start commenting, asking where the coat is from, the shirt, “those shoes”. The post is a paid ad for an ethical jewellery brand, and it’s clear that whether as an influencer or designer, whatever Bush is selling, her people are most definitely buying into it.
This article originally appeared in Fashion Quarterly Summer 2022.
Words: Sarah Murray.
