Niche ID with Laura Markwardt – Détails, épisodes et analyse

In conversation with Morgane Bigault, French photographer, videographer, and director. Her visual language is imbued with a documentary aesthetic – raw, considered, and human. She brings a sense of play and restraint to her craft, "limitation can actually open yourself to being more creative." From documenting athletics clubs to Olympians, Morgane both shows and tells, "there's a form of grace in training."

Morgane's creative inspirations:

Serge Gainsbourg, Jacques Brel, Barbara, Paco Ibanez, Michel Polnareff, Johnny Hallyday, Ana Cuba, Madeleine Penfold , Pauline Ballet, Florence Pernet, Linda Brownlee, Pia Riverola.

MorganeBigault.com

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In conversation with Milo Bragg, London-based skateboarder, Juno Records label manager, and label owner at Future Primitive. From communes to cover art, skating to supporting new artists, this one doesn’t miss a beat.

In 2020, Milo launched Club Rooted, a mix series of non-floor-focused sound, tapping into a lineage that can be traced back through various scenes—from recent slow or kickass techno and abstract UK bass music to autonomic D’n’B, knackered house, Detroit beatdown, and various strands of electronica or IDM. 

Lots of Milo's recommendations to immerse yourself here:

• Juno
• Club Rooted
• Purelink.bandcamp.com
• Huerco S: .discogs.com/artist/2367552-Huerco-S
• Motion Ward: soundcloud.com/motion-ward
• Music From Memory: soundcloud.com/music-from-memory
• Short Span: shortspanrecords.bandcamp.com/
• Peak Oil: peakoil.bandcamp.com/
• Venue M.O.T: ra.co/clubs/156290
• Space Talk: spacetalklondon.com/
• One Eye Witness: one-eye-witness.com/
• Rubadub: rubadub.co.uk/
• Clone: clone.nl/
• Rush Hour: rushhour.nl/
• Boomkat: boomkat.com/
  

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In conversation with Leila Jones, Co-Director of Indie Production Company, Show Ponies. We talk about her annual Glastonbury-on-Sea production – now in its fifth year this June. Also, her role in the legend of Lost Vagueness, creative risk-taking, and her formative (and funny) years of 'wild abandon.' See Leila in The Lost in Vagueness documentary. See Show Ponies.

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In conversation with Brooklyn-based Dan Jones, bestselling British author and collaborative writer. Dan’s written over 20 books, with Gin: Shake, Muddle, Stir selling over 200,000 copies, translated into a dozen languages.

Longlisted for the Curtis Brown First Novel Award, Dan contributes to The New York Times' Wirecutter and specializes in everything from cocktails to fashion, interiors, travel, wellness, mythology, and LGBTQ culture.

With irreverent, well-informed takes on the writing life and the fast-paced bookish scene in NYC, you can find Dan giving The Washington Post hot takes on Princess Di’s style, in flow-mode at the Center for Fiction’s Writing Studio, or, like all the literary greats, at home with a beer watching Just like that.

Dan’s latest books for 2025: Yves Saint Laurent: Style Icon (Quadrille), and the paperback versions of Queer Heroes of Myth & Legend and Queer Villains of Myth & Legend (Radar/Hachette).

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In conversation with Lucinda Bounsall, Strategy Director and founder of Sibling Studio. Lucinda joins me to talk about her specialism in modern subcultures, her thoughts on A.I., anti-mentors, and the power of a good quad graph. She says of her craft, “It’s not like maths, where there’s only one right answer, with strategy there can be many different answers.” Phew. 

What’s more, Lucinda’s exceptional face recognition skills put her in the top three percent of the general population as a super recogniser. So yeah, she’s probably seen you around.

Recommends: Podcasts: Nymphete alumni, Polyester, Afterwork drinks Reads: New York Magazine, The Financial Times, The Economist, [book] Culture is bad for you by Mark Taylor, Orian Brook and Dave O'Brien

Sibling Studio

Sibling Studio’s Substack, Post-Culture 

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In conversation with Lee Glandorf, author of Boston’s best Substack® The Sweat Lookbook, and former Director of Marketing at Tracksmith.

Lee is many things: an advocate for women in sport, a writer, historian, runner, rower, mother, marketeer, twin, and all-around creative behemoth who's both accomplished and humble enough to admit that – like all of us – she's still learning.

Lee's always been obsessed with the intersection between sports and fashion. "It goes back to being a little girl, and picking my sports based on what we were gonna wear." A girl after my own heart.

Recommends: Podcasts:The Rest is History, The Shit No One Told You About Writing. Books: Save the Cat Writes a Novel [how to write a bestselling novel in 15 beats] Substacks: As Seen On [Ochuko’s newsletter] Writers Lee rates: Elizabeth Holmes [the royal commentator], journalists Robin Gibbon and Vanessa Friedman

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In conversation with Jozef White, founder of Tabula Rasa Records, a writer and philosopher. Jozef was born and raised in San Francisco and has landed, for now, in New Zealand.

Jozef’s creative output thrives in spaces where people move together – whether that's collating collective works that capture a specific time signature, or curating events in person in Tokyo, Amsterdam, and San Diego. 

The episode kicks off with an attempt to bridge the cultural chasm that splits California and New Zealand. Then we explore ideas from Tabula Rasa's Substack, Inscripta – specifically, three of Jozef’s essays; I can only think when I run, Release schematics (essays #1 and #2), and You are not owed a creative career. 

N.B At about 15.40mins in, Jozef mentions a 5, 4, 2, and 12-beat framework and a Taylor Swift song that mirrors a similar time signature. We don’t mention the name of the Swift song, but it’s likely closure from the album, evermore.

Recommends/mentions: Inscripta Substack, Tabula Rasa Catalogue – and the everynoise.com playlist, which currently tracks one song from every genre.

Related reading:

Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka

Music discovery is broken. Can it be fixed? [DrownedinSound.org]
The rise of fan-driven discovery [Emwhitenoise.Substack.com]

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In conversation with Emily Ash Powell, writer, creative leader, and brand consultant. Born and raised in South Wales (with the wildly ambitious Welsh-speaking qualifications to prove it), Emily’s career got off to a fashionable start on the Topshop shop floor in Bridgend. In those halcyon days, Emily, just 16 years old in Joanie jeans, watching Friends in the staff room with her excellent boss, Debbie, would’ve had a hard time imagining things ever getting better than that. 

Plot twist: They did. Since then, she’s worked for tons of huge brands – most recently as Global Head of Creative at Tony’s Chocolony in Amsterdam and Global Head of Copy and Editorial at Bumble, over here in London. 

If you read Emily’s newsletter, Hurdling (check it out, it’s great) you’ll get to know her delightful sense of humour and distinctive tone of voice.

My favourite advice is that others should remember they have their own voices, too. Listen now for more ways to cultivate yours.

Read and subscribe to ⁠Hurdling with Emily Ash Powell⁠

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In conversation with Devin Kelly, poet, author, and teacher. 

Devin joins me fresh from a hard track session with his New York run club. He’s sitting in his grandmother’s tiny old chair, the exact chair he sat down in every night to pen his latest novel, Pilgrims, a tale of two brothers, one monk, and one racing runaway. The story explores a sibling dynamic, but also a journey “to explore the multitudes of personalities that can exist inside a person.”

Devin’s got a devoted literary fanbase, born of the personal essays he’s written over the years for LongReads. See: Stumbling can be lovely, newly featured in the 2025’s anthology of This Year’s Best Sports Writing – the second time he’s made the cut.

Our conversation covers everything from profound themes of suffering to pedestrian themes of learning to drive. The value of play, laughter, his creative process, and making friends with poets at grad school, “always my favourite people.” 

There’s so much wisdom here, all delivered with Devin’s signature grace and eloquence. Thank you, Devin, for your art and your words.

PILGRIMS is out on Great Place Books on 18th November, 2025

Devin’s Substack, Ordinary Plots

Recommends/mentions: In the Driver’s Seat and Through the Children’s Gate by Adam Gopnik, Zen Motoring, the poet Larry Leavitt, author Max Porter, Denis Johnson (Jesus’ Son), Raymond Carver, James Baldwin, Marilyn Robertson, Ali Smith, William Finnegan (Barbarian Days), Bill Buford, Carl Phillips (My Trade is a Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing)

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Roya Shariet pitched to Emily Weiss, founder of Glossier, on the streets of New York, back in 2018. It changed her world. “I got a job offer for a job that didn’t exist, with no job description, to lead social impact at Glossier.” Don’t you just love it when that happens?

She stayed for almost seven years – through the wildly successful launch of the You fragrance and the inception of Glossier’s partnership with the WNBA. Heads up, beauty x sport fans – that partnership’s still going strong, five years later. 

Today, an Iranian-American cookbook and a hundred thousand followers on TikTok later, Roya's still building out spaces that intersect her passions – beauty, sport, fragrance, and food. 

We chat about leveraging fandoms through Glossier x WNBA, the importance of storytelling in fragrance, and the (frankly, wild) amount of work that goes into nailing that ‘undone’ look. But we also explore the art of making your own luck – which, as Roya explains, tends to strike big when you’re brave enough to ask.

Roya’s links: Consumed⁠ Substack, Maman and Me: Recipes from our Iranian American Family⁠, Roya’s Insta⁠, Roya’s Cooking Insta⁠

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