40 Years of London

London, 1986. Bowie turns Wembley to stardust. Westwood rips fashion apart at the seams — tears it, pins it, rebuilds it into something the world hasn’t seen. The city doesn’t ask permission. Neither do the women who live in it.

Every woman begins somewhere electric. The eighties were neon and noise — a decade of beautiful eccentricity, when the world was vast and every day was an invention. Before anyone told us what to be, we just were: curious, wild, dazzling in ways only childhood allows. Stars weren’t just in the sky; they were on stage, in the streets, safety-pinned to leather jackets. And inside every girl, a quiet certainty that she was made for something.

Then comes the decade when girls want everything. The Union Jack becomes a dress. Five women tell the world what we really really want — and a generation believes them. Every woman has her nineties: the years of becoming, of finding the people who feel like home, of dancing like the song was written for you. Bright-eyed. Fearless. Convinced the night will never end.

It doesn’t. The noughties arrive — reckless, romantic, beautifully undone. Kate Moss at Glastonbury, mud on her boots and a crown on her head. Every woman carries a version of these years: the ones where you’re finding your way, making glorious mistakes, learning what matters by discovering what doesn’t. Building a life that looks nothing like a plan — and everything like your own.

London, like women, doesn’t stand still. Every woman has her transformation. Maybe several. The moment you stop performing someone else’s idea of your life and start building your own. Some women do it in a single afternoon. Some take years and make it look effortless. Every woman trades something along the way. And what she gains — every time — is more of herself.

Every woman has her own Sakura — a symbol of renewal and the courage it takes to bloom. That quiet season when you learn to sit with your emotions instead of outrunning them. When the decade ahead feels less like something happening to you and more like something you’re choosing. When reinvention stops being a crisis and becomes a gift.

That’s the secret London has always known. Every decade is a new city. Every decade is a new woman. The person you were at twenty is not the person you are at thirty, and she is not the person you’ll be at forty. Each version is whole. Each version matters. And the next one — the next one is always the most interesting.

Forty years. Four decades of a city and its women — tearing apart, rebuilding, dancing, growing, blooming. Tonight is an invitation: to celebrate Isa, to celebrate you, to celebrate all women, to celebrate London. And what timing — the Year of the Horse has just begun. A year for those who run free, who lead with fire, who were never meant to be tamed.

Let’s dance.