How I convinced Vogue the story was worth telling

I had it written down not as a formal goal but on my personal wish list, the kind you write when you’re being honest with yourself about what you actually want, not just what seems reasonable to want.

“Appear in Vogue. At least once.”

It felt audacious when I wrote it, maybe even a little naive. Vogue covers stories and the story has to be worth telling. So I kept building, kept believing the work was worth telling and kept going, even when nothing confirmed it yet.

Last year, just before my wedding, I received the call.

I was wearing my wedding dress and Margherita was in the middle of transforming it - my mother’s dress, reworked, reimagined, made mine - when Laura Tortora from Vogue Italia reached out: they wanted to cover the story, the dress and of course the love behind it.

I remember the feeling with complete precision: something more disorienting than happiness. The kind of joy that arrives when something you wrote on a wish list, something you carried quietly for years, suddenly becomes real.

What Vogue chose to tell was a story about love, mine and Andrea’s and about the meaning held inside an object that already existed, already carried history, and was transformed rather than replaced. The dress my mother wore for her wedding became the dress I wore and Menabòh’s work was at the center of it.

That is the story Vogue decided was worth telling.

I think about this often, because the path to that moment was not linear. There were pitches that went unanswered, introductions that didn’t lead anywhere, periods where the work felt invisible to the people I most wanted to reach.

But I had written it down and that mattered more than I expected. There is something about committing a desire to paper that changes your relationship to it. It stops being a vague hope and becomes something you are accountable to: you stop waiting for permission and start making decisions in the direction of it.

Resilience, I have learned, is the quieter, more demanding practice of showing up for the work, refining the story, believing it is worth telling even when the evidence hasn’t arrived yet.

The evidence does arrive and when it does the feeling is I didn’t stop.

Write it down, stay accountable to it and keep going until it becomes real. Because the story was always worth telling. The only question was whether you would keep believing that long enough for someone else to see it too.

What have you written down, or been afraid to write down, because it felt too big to want?

This article was written by Gaia, founder of Menabòh. For more of her writing, follow her personal newsletter on Substack.