MediaDiet: Bronte Molyneux
Bronte Molyneux is wherever her handbag is
Bronte is never far from her handbag, and we will tell you why. She’s known affectionately to one SKMG partner as Bronte Handbag, a reputation built among friends for coming as a package deal with (you guessed it) her handbag. The name stuck hard enough to become an Instagram handle, which makes it feel less like an inside joke and more like a public declaration of love to an accessory.
Anyway, we’re waaaay off track.
This MediaDiet begins, fittingly, with bells instead of alarms because Bronte has just figured out the meaning behind the number of church chimes drifting through her Paris apartment: eight bells for 8am… and so forth… for those interested.
She’s a casting director and creative producer working between Paris and New York, whose job it is to understand character, faces, posture, eras and implications. Her media consumption mirrors that. There’s books over feeds. Libraries over algorithms. Physical references over recycled aesthetics. She is tactically guarded against the flattening effect of the internet by stepping outside it whenever possible.
That’s not to say she’s not online. She’s still hyper-connected (without being consumed) and is living proof that you can travel constantly, carry everything with you, and know exactly what to hold onto.
This is a day-in-the-life of one gal, her handbag and everything in between.
Wake up
The first sound I consume is the morning church bells… I recently moved into an apartment overlooking an old Catholic church in Paris and it’s become my unofficial alarm clock. Eight bells at 8am. I only recently learnt the number of rings corresponds to the hour (apparently everyone else has always known this), but nonetheless I now start my mornings counting chimes on my fingers before I’m fully conscious.
Then yes, I reach for my phone. I usually wake up to a bunch of messages given I also work across LA, New York, Europe and Australia, so half the world has already lived a whole day by the time I wake up regardless of where I am. I realise this goes against every wellness recommendation to limit screentime first thing in the morning, but I think it’s also a nice reminder that the world keeps moving while you sleep.
Morning
Mornings are my most coherent hours, so I try to do anything that actually feeds my brain before midday. The first hour is usually me and my coffee, sitting in silence and staring at a wall while I try to make sense of the inside of my brain or ChatGPT search the meaning of my dreams (lol). After that, I’ll write a little, meditate, flip through a few books or magazines, check social media, newsletters etc. It’s my time to take in different forms of inspiration before the workday noise begins.
Working in the creative industry means you’re naturally absorbing a lot of content, and it’s easy for everything to start blending into one aesthetic if you’re not intentional. That’s partly why I try to carve out time with books and physical references and made an effort to build relationships with book archivists and libraries. It pushes me to access imagery and ideas that aren’t circulating online and keeps my references a bit more unexpected.
So much of my job involves thinking about character, how a face can tell a story, the way beauty shifts across eras, and the cultural assumptions we project onto certain features. Having deeper visual roots such as art, architecture, literature, photography, and even personal life experiences helps me maintain a sense of my own visual language and avoid becoming repetitive and becomes the framework I draw from when I’m building characters, shaping narratives, and deciding what kinds of beauty feel relevant, interesting or emotionally honest in my work.
Afternoon
Afternoons are my “do the actual work” block: reviewing assets, developing briefs, answering emails, planning shoots, meeting collaborators for coffee. My tabs are usually a predictable rotation of Google docs, email, a million different talent packages, Pinterest… I do a lot of talent and location research on Instagram to be honest. My saved folders are kind of ridiculous... “lovations” (locations I’d love to shoot), “interesting hair Eastern Europe”, “dancers south of France”, “HMUA Belgrade” etc.
For online hubs, I love are.na for references and inspiration and tumblr too (lol, sue me and my 16-year-old self).
For hardcopy books and magazines, I have this book called A Seminar on Time by A.G.E Blake, which I have gone back to again and again for years. It’s basically a transcription of a lecture exploring the relationship between spiritual, psychological and scientific dimensions and always makes me think about our inter-relation to the world and one another in different ways. Then, i-D Magazine is always a fave, as is The Face. I particularly love the old versions of either of these, if I can find them in archive stores or at flea markets.
For actual bookstores, High Valley Books in Greenpoint is amazing for archive magazine references and Aeon Bookstore in Two Bridges NYC for anything esoteric/art books/quantum physics related.
At this exact moment, it’s 2pm and I’m deep in a multi-channel conversation with a friend, talking about a handbag (lol) she’s designing. She’s voice noting me on WhatsApp, we’re DMing memes on Instagram, I’m sending her Vestiaire links as references… it’s like four conversations layered on top of each other across three different apps. Kind of the norm in modern collaboration and friendship at this point, I guess.
Evening
Evenings totally depend on the night. If I’m at home, I’ll put a record on while I make dinner. Last night it was a Laraaji record I got from an amazing collector in New York years ago. Given the amount of time I spend on screens, it feels grounding to listen to something that exists outside of the internet.
Before bed I do these weird EFT tapping sequences from a very boomer-coded YouTube channel called Tap with Brad, and then fall asleep listening to some form of frequency sound waves on my phone. I realise this sounds a little woo woo and insane, but add some 432 Hz into your bedtime routine and you’ll never look back ;)
Bronte’s Picks & Recs
SCREEN TIME: Absolutely none of my business
SUBSCRIBED TO: ChatGPT, Spotify, Soundcloud
SOMETHING I WANT YOU TO READ: The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy
SOMETHING I WANT YOU TO LISTEN TO:
AN UNEXPECTED GOOGLE SEARCH: “How many cows in the world?” (More than 1.5 billion.)
A LINK WORTH FORWARDING: https://australianfemicidewatch.org/database/