For a girl that read Vogue as religiously as Aviation Week and sketched figurines as furiously as fuselage, I often struggled with the dichotomy between form and function. Amidst the glorious period of naiveté that was my childhood, I truly held on to the ‘absurd’ notion that I did not have to pick one over the other. And while Kalpana Chawla and Anna Wintour were equally prominent role models, Vogue had no space for Science and NASA had no space for fashion.
What this meant for a large chunk of my life was selecting lab appropriate sweats paired with sneakers, which left no room for chiffon shirts that day. It just wasn’t practical.
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Suddenly the question no longer remained as to how to be comfortable and chic. It was how to fend off questions about looking fresh faced for lab in the morning and carrying through the glow at late night Design, Build, Fly sessions. The preferred answer was simply to gush about my enthusiasm for building or commit to the caffeine-fuelled, bug-eyed engineer aesthetic. There was no room for a BECCA Champagne Pop Highlighter or Glossier Haloscope to spruce it up.
I was fooled once again by the notion that social constructs did not dictate that I had to limit my knowledge.
This felt absurd.
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One may have the capacity to appreciate the gleaming sheen on a MonoKote wing and on one's cheeks. One does not take away from the other.
Here at I Need Space, we seek to create luxury - the luxury of choice and a life free of assumption and bounds. This is why I joined the team – we don’t need a trade off ladies. We need to continue our unwavering determination to seek knowledge in all realms - for our love for space, for our pursuit of the unknown.
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