Brexit: a memory
How I moved to Milan 2 months after the referendum - and moved back again a year later
I decided, in the immediate aftermath of Brexit, to move to Milan. But queuing up to buy pens in the Muji store on Via Torino, I began to question myself.
The man at the till, also foreign, with an Italian only slightly better than mine, asked me, di dove sei? Where are you from? I replied, Inghilterra, England.
He looked at me, quizzically. Perchè sei qui? Avete scelto di lasciare Europa.
Why are you here? You decided to leave Europe.
And here I was in the Muji shop, two weeks in, trying to buy pens for my new job, with all my life choices bundled up and passed back at me, questioningly, along with my receipt.
The day after I graduated from my French and Italian degree, like a joke with a horrifying punchline, the UK left the EU.
The morning of the referendum result, I took a taxi to the railway station, to go into town for my interview at Yoox Net A Porter in White City. The female taxi driver was Polish. I am from Poland, I seem to remember her saying to me, as I got in the car at 8am. I am so sorry, I think I replied. It wasn’t me.
But it didn’t really matter, how I had personally voted, because it effectively was me, as a British person, part of a country that had voted to Leave. I felt a mark of shame, a responsibility for my fellow citizens, an inadequacy for failing to communicate why it mattered to be in Europe, how I saw myself as a European first, and an English person second.
I was so bewildered, I forgot to put a bra on. I had to buy one from the Accessorise at Kings Cross and slip it over my head in the ladies’ loos.
Despite the merger of Yoox and Net A Porter, there was little friendly collaboration between the offices, either on the day of interview or any subsequent moment of my time with the business. The decision had been made in another era, one that no longer existed, and I’m sure it was in part what led to the scuppering of one of Italy’s only start-up unicorns.
Did I have an interview with a NAP person in London, or was it via video call? I can’t remember. I did fly out to Italy for an interview in person. It was all a blur, pushing through with the dream of working in Milan while all around me the headlines spoke of Britain crashing out of Europe, no jobs for foreigners, any red line that the UK put in place to be reciprocated right back at us. Gone, in theory, if not quite yet in reality, the dreams I had, as a new graduate, of “moving abroad” and “doing some translation” while I “figured things out.”
When the cashier in the Muji shop asked me what I was doing in Milan, he was not the first person.
Almost everyone I’d met across YNAP since my first day had asked me the same thing. They could not fathom that I’d voluntarily chosen to move abroad at the very moment my whole country had chosen to consciously uncouple from the continent.
And while I tried to explain #NotAllBrits or the less than 5% in it, or the older/younger divide, the whole conversation made me desperately unhappy, isolated and stuck.
It felt like I couldn’t put down roots or advance in my career, as I didn’t know how long I’d be able to stay. I couldn’t quit my job that I didn’t like much, to freelance or intern, as I felt like I needed the contract to preemptively prove a point. Around me, my Serbian, Korean, Turkish and Thai colleagues, also outside the EU, lamented the bureaucracy and paperwork needed to stay in their home year after year, despite each of them having arrived in Milan almost a decade prior.
And then, there was the incredulity, from some sectors of the office, that I had chosen to come to Italy at all, leaving behind a perception of a good job in London (where many young people in Italy used to move to, pre-Brexit, for a year of language learning and waiting tables) for Milan’s long staff lunches, a close knit cutting-edge cultural scene and the ability to walk both to work and into town (or take a tram if it got too hot). Oh, and no one asking you where you went to school, in that classically British class/caste way.
I was 21, and couldn’t quite articulate the appeal in Italian, but ask me again today, in the midst of a heatwave, and I’ll tell you all the ways that London work can suck one’s soul, and how we can learn from Milan’s balanced and heat-appropriate approach to corporate life.
At the end of my year in Italy, I left. After hustling for six months for a different role outside of training ML tools, trying to move into creative strategy, I was offered a year’s unpaid internship in an ad agency. Given everything that had happened, and the roiling political context, I couldn’t work out how to swing it.
I reluctantly accepted my fate - and Brexited.
*
My name is Lara and I’m a writer and strategy consultant. I write weekly-ish here on Substack about new forms of desire and aspiration. Did someone forward this to you? Did you enjoy it? Hit subscribe to make sure you get the next post.