TRENDIE®
A standard for the Tasteful Hedonist.
What you’ll find here.
Trendie Life is split into a few things, because living and building doesn’t happen in one lane.
Travel — City guides to follow loosely, and what it feels like to be somewhere when you’re actually paying attention.
Culture — What’s actually Trendie, and what’s just trendy. Things worth your attention when everything else is noise.
The Edit — Places, people, and things that are trendie. Experiences worth trying once, telling a friend about, or going back to.
Staying Trendie — My notes on building, doubting, and figuring it out. Living the Trendie life in real time, and finding joy in all of it.
Some weeks it’s a personal essay. Some weeks it’s a place I can’t stop thinking about. Either way, it’s me applying the same standard to everything.
A little note from me
Hi, I’m India.
I’m half French, half English and currently living and building The Trendie Life.
Trendie isn’t something I whipped out of thin air, it’s inspired by my own life, shaped by my own values, my love for travel, culture, meeting new people and meaningful experiences.
In a way, it’s my own definition of the good life. A life worth capturing, savouring and enjoying. More than anything, it’s my own reminder to live fully without losing myself. To live hedonistically but tastefully. Spontaneously but intentionally. And staying true to myself in all of it.
That to me, is true luxury. It’s not about having it all, it’s about knowing what truly matters to me and building a life around it. I’m obsessed with moments, big and small, measured in quality of time, connection and experiences rather than material things.
I’ve always been ambitious. But I’ve never wanted my ambition to get in the way of enjoying my life. I never saw myself in an office, working a 9-5, and seeing the same four walls every day. It’s not an environment I thrive in, personally. I’ve always been creative. I need texture, contrast and different perspectives. I’ve always loved putting things together, connecting the dots and turning nothing into something.
I’ve always known I needed to be living to be building. I just didn’t know how. There’s no framework for this, and people often don’t take you seriously when you say living and building aren’t separate. Regardless, I was going to find a way.
I’ve never been able to see living and building as separate things. Living generates the material, the insight, the energy, the connections for building. And building lets you live more. The practice is holding both. I’ve been doing this instinctively my whole life, without ever thinking I’d have to explain it.
I’m all for creating the thing you wish existed. I wish The Trendie Life existed as a third option between escapism and hustle culture, not sacrificing the living part now for a life you might get to later, and not checking out of ambition just to enjoy anything. I wanted both, at the same time without sacrificing the other. So I built the framework myself, and I built the language myself. Mostly because I needed it, and now other people can use it too.
How it started.
At university, I was a sales rep for pretty much every student club night. I made a lot of my friends through doing that, and mostly I just wanted free tickets. Then I’d work the door to pay for my drinks after my shift. Some nights I’d actually sing a couple of songs and get paid £100, have my friends as my plus ones, and use my drinks tokens after. I never saw this as working. I loved it. It made my university experience richer, without the bank account to match.
Despite being sold the work hard, play hard mindset, and having that so ingrained in my head, like most of us. Being surrounded, and working for billionaires saved me years of chasing something I didn’t actually want. The idea that if I worked hard enough, I could afford the chalet I scrubbed toilets in. Or if I sacrificed the living part, I could eventually live the dream. Five months working a season as a chalet girl in Courchevel 1850 taught me more about life than anything I’d learnt at school or even at university. I noticed everything because I was so present, and I wanted to capture it all.
It was the first time I felt in my own life, free from what I thought I needed to be. I was living each day as it was. Working in luxury hospitality will do that to you, but it was actually mostly because I felt grateful to be there. Even if I was there to clean toilets, make beds and serve guests who rarely acknowledged I was even there. It taught me how insignificant I was. Which was strangely freeing. The mountains will do that too. In cities like London, we don’t have anything bigger than us. So our problems feel bigger instead.
I just loved being in the mountains. I loved that no two weeks were the same. That I had very little time to think. My commute was a ski lift, not a packed tube, I was skiing every day, and I had very little to no living expenses whilst I was there. To me, I was living THE dream. And being in the mountains after having lost myself a little working a job in London I knew wasn’t for me felt like I was on the right track. And this time, actually in the driving seat. It was a complete shift in perspective. And I had never felt more myself. I slowly came to realise that I had more than what most people had around me. I was content. I felt free. And I felt grateful. I had less. But I had more.
I’ve wanted to bottle that feeling ever since. Creating content during my season, editing videos during my time off was a hobby more than anything and the creative outlet I needed being in such an inspiring environment. It was the closest I could get to capturing what it felt like to live in the mountains as a chalet girl, and it’s been the foundation of everything I’ve built since. I never planned to turn my content into anything, I just started posting because no one was watching, until they did. 100 million views later, and features in major news outlets like CNN and The Insider started to give me proof that I could live and build at the same time. I work with luxury hospitality brands now, and that season remains the best market research I’ve ever done.
Over the years, and as I continue to, I’ve been trying to navigate this way of living and building. I couldn’t really explain it at first. Mostly because I didn’t really have the language to. The idea of working and playing at the same time, building something and living through it, being ambitious but present all at the same time is hard to explain. Especially when they are usually things you separate rather than hold at the same time. I think you can, and Trendie is the proof. Tasteful Hedonism is the ongoing practice of staying trendie in a world that just wants you to be trendy.
And I hope to keep living and building a life I won’t want to retire from or escape from.
If you’re here, you might have seen something that resonated, or maybe you’re just curious. If you want to understand what Trendie is and why it exists, start with the manifesto.
Underneath all of it, I just want people to live in their own lives a bit more.
Stay Trendie x
