That’s how Jenna Lyons describes the anticlimactic time period following her departure from J.Crew, where the New York fashion executive spent the last 27 years of her professional life.
“I sat on my couch and I was like, maybe someone will call today [with an offer]. Maybe someone will call tomorrow. It was quiet. So quiet.”
However unexpected, Lyons found the silence empowering. It got the former creative director thinking about a podcast that laid out a social experiment where five people are placed in a room with bricks, books, and art supplies. “And then they put another group of people in [another room] with the same art supplies and bricks, but no inspirational reading material. They were only given a phone book. The team that had all of the inspirational material made things they’d already seen in life. But the team that had no inspiration, nothing to look at, had done really creative things. They had ground the bricks down and recreated little sculptures. They had to think for themselves.They kind of just got to craft.”
In her own proverbial room with no “inspirational material”, Lyons had the chance to really ask herself, “What does make me happy? What do I really want to do?”
She’s still figuring that out. But she’s a lot farther along into the process these days. She’s designing a hotel in the Bahamas; she founded Sort Of Creative (formerly known as Lyons L.A.D., or “Life After Death”) – a creative agency that tackles interior design, fashion, and beauty; she launched a lash line (LoveSeen); she’s even become a reality TV personality now, starring in HBO Max’s Stylish with Jenna Lyons, which chronicles her building the new agency’s creative team.