Miranda Holder on resilience, hope and the power of following your passion

Meet Miranda Holder

Miranda Holder is an acclaimed Celebrity Stylist known for dressing familiar faces such as Little Mix, Boy George and Vanessa Williams, creating everything from looks for the red carpet to styling full music videos. She also hosts regular fashion masterclasses, lecturing at the award-winning London College of Style.

Miranda founded the Feel Good Fashion Coach following her own struggle with body image and depression in her younger years, after a life-changing car accident in 2012, in which she nearly lost her leg and fell ill with latent Lyme Disease. After a long, grueling recovery, Miranda experienced a pivotal perspective change and vowed to never waste another day of her precious life. And so she pursued her lifelong dream of working in the fashion industry with great success and is now passionate about helping women look and feel their best, having experienced how healing this can be after hitting rock bottom herself.

Miranda communicates her Feel Good Fashion message through her social media channels which include a loyal, active Instagram community of over 22k and a fast-growing Tik Tok community, boasting a rapidly increasing 40k followers with several videos boasting over a million views and one at 4.2 million!

Miranda also hosts her own ‘Fashion Weekly Podcast with Miranda Holder’ featuring celebrity guests from GMTV’s Ross King who spilled the beans on life in Hollywood, to Insta-famous DJ Fat Tony who spoke candidly about his recovery from drug addiction and his passion for designer trainers.

Extracts taken from the transcript of the podcast recording

Speaker 2 [00:05:22]I was trying to be all things to all people. I was trying to be what I thought I should be raising my kids, feeling very isolated, having left my London life and my tribe really behind. I sort of just ditched them all, and I was trying to settle in with all the coffee mornings and the mothers’ meetings. I was even asked to arrange the church flowers in our village and make jam. And, you know, there I was trying to be absolutely perfect, but it was entirely wrong for me. But at the time, I didn’t know that and I wasn’t ready to admit it. So I was actually pretty depressed and dissatisfied with my life, but not just not willing to even go that route or see that. [44.3s]

Speaker 2 [00:06:19]I was very isolated. I was spending time with people that didn’t resonate with me, and that made me feel rubbish about myself in their presence because I just wasn’t the same as them. But I was trying so hard to fit in with this set of people that actually aren’t me. And I really lost my sense of self, which I know kind of happens anyway when you have kids. I really didn’t realize at the time how important it was to have something for me and have my own things going on, my own life, my hobbies. You know, I went to the gym, and walked the dog. I did a bit of running, but it just wasn’t the same. There was nothing that I was passionate about and I was missing passion. And I love my kids. I was you know, I tried my hardest as a mum, but actually, I, I know that I’ve been a better mum since I’ve changed my life, which obviously will come on to in a moment because I’ve been more fulfilled and more rounded and more happy. I think I’ve been a better example to them based on they’ve seen so many different sides of me, whereas I was quite frustrated and you know, quite short-tempered at times when I really wasn’t living my truth, I guess. But I realized that. [81.8s]

Speaker 2 [00:09:11]Yeah, my legs were crossed on a dashboard on the passenger side and the airbag went off, As it’s meant to, it’s meant to deploy to keep us safe. But of course my feet and ankles were in the way, so it went off. It’s approximately 200 miles an hour, goes off and smashes into the safety glass. And of course, my feet were on top of it. So they were thrown against the safety glass, which didn’t smash because it’s safety glass. It was just one of these moments. It was. It was well, it was actually enormously pivotal. Pivotal to my whole life. And I don’t remember the accident. I remember the car filling with smoke, my husband getting out and screaming at me to get out of the car because he thought it was going to blow up. But then I sort of came to and went to move my legs to get out of the car. And that’s when the most unbelievable, incredible pain that I have never experienced before set in. [67.3s] 

Speaker 2 [00:15:49]But I just kind of checked out, which was my own preservation method, and I didn’t really want to face, you know, what was going on. I was hallucinating most nights. My husband told me to get off Facebook because I was sort of blogging on Facebook in the middle of the night, what was going on. [17.8s]

Speaker 2 [00:25:11]I could either just carry on and feel sorry for myself and give up and accept this amputation and, you know, muddle through as best I could or I could fight my prognosis, I could fight my situation and I could try and squeeze, scrape, you know, pull myself by my fingernails and scrape my way out of this. Um, and I, I sort of scrambled back to my bed and all my fashion magazines were sitting on that. [25.4s]

Speaker 1 [00:27:43]So I obviously I know there’s a point where you were looking at an amputation, but now you had your head together and you were like, right, let’s find alternative ways to treat this. [14.5s]

Speaker 2 [00:27:59]It was a last resort. I absolutely wasn’t prepared to accept that as my reality. There was no way I was going to let that happen. So I tried sort of anything and everything and hit it from all angles. Holistic well-being, and acupuncture to Reiki, to nutrition. And I was very addicted to all of the painkillers. Coming off of those was not easy and fun. And I worked with a specialist to help support me through that. Yeah. And, and then detox because of course, you know, the liver had definitely come a cropper and under all that, that took a while. Not surprisingly, I actually did a course in natural nutrition as a result of all of this because I just wasn’t getting anywhere with the traditional doctors who normally are great if you break a leg. [55.8s]

Speaker 1 [00:58:21]Miranda, before we go, I have one final question that we always ask everybody on the show, and it’s what does becoming more human mean to you? [8.1s]

Speaker 2 [00:58:30]So becoming more human, I think, it’s a big statement, is that I think it’s being unafraid to be vulnerable and be more open with each other. And I think there are so many of us suffering so many different things. We’re all going through our own trials and tribulations, no matter how fantastic things seem on the outside and working in social media and media and fashion is very much about portraying something to the outside world. But I think being more human is being more vulnerable, more accessible, more open and honest so we can actually be real with each other and properly connect with each other, which I think is so important now more than ever, because it’s a pretty tough world at the moment. [51.0s]