Zara Wong Is More Than ‘The Girl With the Cool Job’

BT: How has it changed since welcoming your son?

ZW: I’m more of an evening person so this [self care] is all very much relegated to after 8pm now. It’s probably easier to say now when it’s still early days, but I want to make my baby work with my life, and not change everything around just for him (I mean, within reason). It’s a given that this will evolve anyway, but touch wood, so far he seems pretty easygoing.

BT: What is one non-negotiable way you care for yourself each day?

ZW: I love a coffee or matcha each morning. I love the ritual of it, the taste – I don’t even particularly *need* the caffeine, but I just enjoy the time-out.

BT: Do you ever get the Sunday night blues? Do you have any tips for avoiding them?

ZW: Start to wind down earlier! Instead of procrastinating and whiling away on your phone, have an early dinner, have a shower early and then you can spend the night doing whatever you want. (Clearly, this is written by someone who is no longer in their 20s and can’t go out as easily with a sleeping baby at home.)

BT: While working at Vogue, Mecca and Aje, you’ve cultivated your own following across Instagram and in your newsletter, Screenshot This. What inspired you to create content outside of your roles?

ZW: While I have loved all my jobs and have always been so ambitious and focused on my career, I’ve always been so curious and want to find the best of the best, whatever it is. Whether it’s for travels, how to do your laundry, shopping, cooking, anything, and to share it with friends. I remember travelling with a friend through Paris and Rome once, who commented that what she learnt from me was that it is always worth walking that extra 10 minutes to have that better meal. I like doing, seeing, having and experiencing nice things, and I want you to know about it, too!

I’m that friend who if you wanted to know what the best ice cream/gelato (I will offend by using them interchangeably, sorry) is in Sydney or Melbourne, I would break it down for you. I like Pidapipo in Melbourne for its creamy texture, but also rate Piccolina for its fun flavours, and in Sydney I like Cow and the Moon overall, the creaminess of Rivareno, the ‘Let’s go camping’ flavour at Bodalla and the old schoolness of Gelato Franco. And there’s something to be said about how Gelato Messina has come to define and do so much for Sydney gelato. If you tell me you’re going to Rome, I may tell you about my secret vintage costume jewellery store. Maybe. Only if you promise to send me photos of what they have and help me buy something from there.

BT: Has your relationship with work changed since you became a mother? If so, how?

ZW: I’m not the first person to think this, but priorities. What seems like a disaster can always be fixed. You also learn to work so much faster and more efficiently. I just remind myself that everything should just be like water off a duck’s back. I’m very conscious of how I deal with work stress to make sure I don’t bring it home or take it out unnecessarily elsewhere.

BT: If you had to wear one outfit every day for the rest of your life, what would it be?

ZW: I genuinely love fashion so it’s so hard to decide! A practical outfit would be something similar to what I wore when I was pregnant which I still love – flared zip-up black leggings from Wardrobe.NYC or The Row with an oversized black skivvy from Cos.

BT: What does an actual work week look like for you?

ZW: I work full-time for a fashion brand which allows me some days to work from home. I’m lucky to have a lot of support with care for the baby with my family, so I drop him off or the nanny comes over and I head to the office. Sometimes it might require attending a shoot (anything from a lookbook to ecomm to campaign), reviewing what’s going live that’s consumer-facing, reviewing upcoming collections and doing strategic planning for content, or refining the brand positioning.

In the evenings and weekends, I work on my newsletter – it takes about three to six hours sometimes so I stretch it out over a few days – and also squeeze in personal content creation within it.

BT: Do you have any projects coming up you want to talk about?

ZW: I’ve honestly been so floored by the response to my newsletter. I’ve had it for longer than people may realise (almost three years) and I really just started it because I was living in Melbourne, far away from family during lockdowns, and working a LOT and just didn’t have any hobbies. I had some friends, but you know, I had only been living there for a year – not many!

Doing the newsletter weekly was a way to help keep track of time, otherwise those weeks just all blurred together. I had a lot of readers come through my Instagram, but also so many who had no idea that I worked at Vogue, or MECCA, or wherever, and just came because they were recommended by a friend. It was really, well, nice, to be thought of and considered outside a place where I worked.

A friend once described me as “the girl who has a cool job at a cool company”. Sometimes your own sense of value or self-worth can be wrapped up in it – it definitely was when I was younger, but what maybe helped my sanity was realising very quickly that the majority of the time when working at these places, you are being spoken to or treated very nicely because they want to be featured in the publication you work for, or they want free beauty products or clothes or some other transaction that really just benefits them. It was nice being on maternity leave and having a break from that, and that’s probably when I was able to separate my own self-identity from my career.