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‘I had been gone so long and I was going to be running one of the coolest stores in the world. I wasn’t wearing my mum’s Chanel handbags Growing up, I didn’t have access to fashion. ‘The inspiration was to create a store, a space that was about service, and create an environment that made people feel insanely welcome and that was something that hadn’t been done,’ she says, crediting her apprenticeship in real estate for instilling that hyper focus on the customer. She opened a shop, Yasmin Cho – still aged just 22 at this point – on an upper floor of a building on Poland Street in London’s Soho, stocking hard-to-get emerging brands, where the likes of Courtney Love would shop up a storm.
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‘I am so grateful… I didn’t know that London would be a big part of who I am.’ This being the late 1990s, Cool Britannia was in full swing and the couple was in the epicentre of it all, living together in an old piano factory in Kentish Town, where Lee McQueen might drop by to party. Within a few months of meeting, madly in love and soon to marry, the pair headed to the UK. ‘And my life changed in that moment,’ she says. I shaved my hair and felt like I was myself.’ Two nights later, she met a cute British actor by the name of Rufus Sewell in a bar. Feeling thwarted and restless to change up something in her life, she decided to shave her hair off, to a number two: ‘I had this long curly hair and I wasn’t quite the person I was with all the hair. Her early attempts to break in proved dispiriting – she remembers going for an assistant’s job at Marie Claire Australia and not even getting an interview. With her potential ignited, Sewell then set about pursuing something she felt she could be really passionate about: fashion.
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Sewell thrived in the job, so much so that she ended up running the company with her boss.
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That’s kind of where I was at.’ It was a kismet moment. I just wanted to run away, go work in a café on Bondi Beach, maybe smoke weed. At that point, I wasn’t really into anything. She left when she was just 15, joining a real-estate company whose founder had called round the Sydney schools looking for an embryonic firecracker to hire. Interestingly, given how potently persuasive Sewell is in the field of business, school never connected for her. It was Australia – it was nature, beach and sports.’ I had no awareness of creativity, it was just my family and my community. I wasn’t wearing my mum’s Chanel handbags. ‘Growing up, I didn’t have access to fashion. It was hardly a typical breeding ground for the nascent fashionista. We spent a lot of time at my grandmother’s house – Arabic food, Arabic music, Arabic community.’ Her mother ran the local hairdressing salon, where young Yasmin would hang out after school, sweeping up hair and reading the gossip weeklies. ‘We are Lebanese, so I grew up in this Arabic family life. Her mood is relaxed and expansive as she brews me a mug of chai, while explaining that this square was the original inspiration for EastEnders, and is still used as a reference.īorn in Australia, Sewell was brought up in a close-knit community in the suburbs of Sydney. She was in the throes of divorce while she was navigating her departure from Farfetch: ‘A big time for me… it wasn’t an easy time, either.’ She’s wearing a Loewe Totoro T-shirt in zinging green, which coordinates perfectly with the intense colour scheme of the interior of the house. This is where she lives with her two sons, aged nine and six, and their curly-haired hound, ‘Pizza’. Today, Sewell, 45, greets me as she returns from a dog walk in an east London square filled with late summer hollyhocks. ‘I followed that instinct, thank God, and now I feel like things are flowing much better… Like there is magic around.’ ‘You go through those periods when things don’t work out: they don’t go to plan, they don’t work in your time frame and then, all of a sudden, it shifts,’ she says. And nor was it the first audacious leap she has taken in a life that has spanned crashing lows, soaring highs and a relentless resilience throughout. Having left her role as vice president of creative at Farfetch some months earlier, effectively calling time on a 25-year blockbuster career in fashion (a move that surprised many), this was, by no means, her first experience of crisis or loss. Whatever you can get.” And I said, “I don’t think that is what I am going to do. And my mum said, “Just go and get any job you can. ‘I felt completely lost, wondering, Can I continue to pay my mortgage? You know? I think I was crying. There was a moment, in the darkest days of the lockdown in London, when one of the hard-fought-for investors in Yasmin Sewell’s wellbeing start-up, Vyrao, had just told her they were pulling out.