People have always said I’m a little nuts.
When I walked into a gymnastics club in Los Angeles as a pre-teen in the late 80s, the coach there took one look at my five-foot-10-inch frame and said, “What are you doing here? Go play volleyball like your brothers!” I stuck it out for eight years, six days a week, three hours a day, heaving my enormous body across the mat and teetering over the beam as the fairy-size girls soared and spun with ease.
Eventually, I watched that coach’s blue eyes pop out of his head when I did my first giant—an advanced move that flings your entire body 360 degrees around the uneven parallel bars in a handstand position—and went on to compete in many regional and state championships. I didn’t win, but I was there.
Part of this was determination and grit; part of this was naïveté and recklessness. I tend to jump when others say, “No way.” After I moved to Milan, more than 20 years ago, and worked hard to build up a successful career in fashion journalism, the well-heeled Italians all said I was crazy to stop writing and start my own fashion business from scratch.
It took me years to penetrate the gilded gates of the Milanese fashion-and-design scene—and this was in a pre-blogging and pre-influencer era, for crying out loud, when it was practically impossible to get invited into the chambers of big-name designers or inside Milan’s secret homes. Why would I give up my access to the glittering parties and my front-row seat at all the top fashion shows to start with wobbly legs on a project no one besides me even cared about?
My idea made little sense on paper—selling vintage clothing, modeling my finds on all the creative women of Milan, and showing the rest of the world how to live like a carefree, happy, well-fed, and beautifully dressed Italian. “What?,” a few Milanese friends and colleagues croaked when I mentioned my idea. Except for a handful of aristocratic men who delighted in their grandfathers’ impeccably maintained wardrobes, most Italians weren’t buying or wearing vintage.
But as I slowly grew my brand, La DoubleJ, then moved on to design my own clothing, housewares, and accessories, I realized something. When we create from a fully activated heart space—in layperson’s terms, from instinct and passion—our creations are fueled by a galactic sort of gasoline. My gut-brain felt so good that it seemed coated in energetic Teflon that even the naysayers couldn’t scratch.
So my little Web site, swirling with color and print and almost vibrating with joy, soon soared and roared out new clothing, new housewares, and dozens of partnerships with historic Italian companies, which took us from a puny, three-person, broke operation to a fully profitable, independently owned enterprise with 70 full-time employees.
And then there’s my spiritual practice, which has been instrumental in stabilizing my mental health through storms of infertility, divorce, and depression. It has also become the guiding force of my company’s success, but it produced the most finger-wags.
Many people told me point-blank that I was nuts to think that an energy healer was going to help in my fertility process. Well, those sessions did not produce a human, but after nine months of work, I did pop out my fashion company and, eventually, countless other creations.
Part of this was determination and grit; part of this was naïveté and recklessness.
Over the course of a decade of diverse spiritual trainings, very sage teachers have told me I shouldn’t talk about my spiritual practice publicly, that somehow, it would soil my veil of divinity and pollute my consciousness. Many others wondered why I would even bring it into my fashion business; it was like Kmart and couture—they don’t go together. But my public-facing videos as well as DoubleJ’s spiritual offerings would become a great magnetizer of a community of women who were drawn to the brand for the cute dress but then stayed around for one of the many mind-body-spirit workshops we conducted.
In the end, a great energetic cleanse, meditation technique, or hookup with a band of angels or star beings will last you infinitely longer than a silk pantsuit.
A lot of this non-traditional fashion activity occurs in one of the most traditional fashion places on earth: Milan’s fancy-pants quadrangle, where we placed our first flagship in 2021, across from Bottega Veneta and next to Chanel. Opening smack in the middle of the pandemic, when the city was still adhering to one of the strictest lockdown policies in the world, was the first “Yeah, good luck with that” feedback I got. The second no-no was the creation downstairs of a “sacred grotto,” which we filled with five iterations of the Divine Mother, a bunch of archangels, and an installation of upside-down bats.
“You’re going to get arrested—this is Italy, headquarters of the Catholic Church!” a friend warned. We went ahead anyway, hosting dozens of yin-yoga workshops, Ascended Masters channelings, and divine-DNA activations. We also brought a water healer and an emotional archeologist to the gazillion-star Passalacqua hotel, on Lake Como, pleasantly surprising the V.I.P. customers of Net-a-Porter, who were expecting a regular old cocktail party but instead sat in a sisterly circle around an arrangement of stones and began pouring their gorgeous hearts out. I’ve co-hosted spiritual trips to Egypt with my friend the high priestess Dee Kennedy, which drew many La DoubleJ clients and inspired our latest fall collection, which is imbued with all of the ceremonial symbols and work we did in the temples.
And next month, I will publish my book, Mamma Milano, an ode to my first 22 years in Italy. When I told my agent that I planned to write about Italy as my first spiritual teacher—the country is, in fact, a national embodiment of the divine-feminine energy and slapped me into alignment faster than anyone—she said, “O.K., but you’re going to sell a lot more books if you just show some great-looking fashion, tables piled with gorgeous Italian food, and coastal paradises.”
Well, I’ve got all that. But I also show my harebrained days of fighting against Italy’s powerful energetic principles and the universal lessons inherent therein. (In a nutshell: go with the flow, guys, just go with the flow.) And I dive into the many ways anyone can harness the transformative power of the Divine Mother, just by surrendering to the chaos and letting her fuel your inner creativity, consciousness, wisdom, and joy.
People always said I was nuts. And I’m totally cool with it.
J. J. Martin is the founder and creative director at La DoubleJ, a Milan-based fashion-and-accessories house. Her first book, Mamma Milano: An Insider’s Guide to Creative Self-Discovery, the Italian Way, is out on October 17
