8. Veneer
London, 1999. Bond Street after midnight.
I’m walking past windows of stores I can’t afford to enter, looking at clothes I’ll never wear, studying display techniques without realizing I was studying them and that I would later lean on replicating them. The shops are closed but the lights are on, and from the street you can see everything: the precise fold of a pocket square, the way a cashmere coat drapes on invisible shoulders, the architecture of luxury.
I’m twenty-one, broke, living in a basement room with particle board furniture and a single cup from the Conran shop that cost more than I should have spent. Eating ramen. Bleaching my hair silver because that’s what fashion school kids do. Wearing a turtleneck like Augustine, my illustration instructor, as if the costume might make me real.
I remember thinking in metaphor in a very art school way: This is what real wood looks like.
The window displays. The rich wood fixtures. The brass. The nickel. The deep, certain grain of money and history and permanence.
And then thinking rather dejectedly: I am not this.
I feared I was a lot more like my shabby room, particle board wearing a thin plastic veneer. Twenty-five years later, I have days where I’m still not sure I was wrong.
That basement room near Regent’s Park. God, it was a shithole. Rough Berber carpet on concrete. Laminate wood furniture, not even real wood. Little side table, bed, single mattress, desk, wardrobe. One window into a light well, so I was literally just looking at concrete. I spent as little time as possible in there.
I did not have a radio. I did not have a television. Pre-smartphones, so no escape hatch to the world. Just me, alone, in this room with art materials, some worn out clothes, cold. Knowing there were students on upper floors living in much nicer rooms. Shared bathroom down the hall, though nobody lived in the damn basement so the shared bathroom was basically my bathroom. That was the one nice thing.
I would heat water in my kettle and make ramen noodles and eat them with crackers pretty much every day. Once a week I would go to a little Moroccan place on Marylebone High Street where they got to know me. They probably thought I was some rich American kid using his parents’ credit card. I wasn’t. I think over time they began to understand that I couldn’t really afford what I was doing there. That I was out of my depth.
So I wandered. I walked until my legs and feet went numb, either from the cold or the distance. I would go to fabric shops, embroidery shops, the odds and ends places with buttons and embellishments. I would wander through Selfridges or Liberties just to be out of the cold and walk somewhere warm with other people around. As humans, I think we’re conditioned to want that. I’m introverted, I like time to myself, but I like to be by myself together, if that makes sense. I want to be around people. I want to know that humanity is an actual thing.
And late at night, I would walk Bond Street. New Bond Street. Savile Row. The shops closed but the windows lit. Those windows were portals. I would stare and move on and just think and imagine what it would be like to wear those clothes. To be in those settings. That luxury. That warmth.
What struck me most was the depth.
Where I was actually living, my actual existence, it was very thin. Very surface. I hate to say it, but it was very veneer. It didn’t have the depth of real mahogany or real walnut. It was just veneer. And I felt thin and cheap.
So when I looked at these things, I imagined what it must be like to be thick and full and real. There’s a smell and weight and presence to real wood. Veneer? No. To have that depth and certainty, that weighty presence. I longed for that. I longed for that from my world of thin veneer.
Maybe it was some kind of metaphor I didn’t understand at the time. Was my life, this thing from Milan and now to London, was I afraid it was just a veneer? That I wasn’t real wood? Maybe I’ve always feared that I’m just a piece of particle board with plastic, or in a best case, very thin wood on top. Beautiful to all the people who didn’t know any better back home because they were from a farm or in the government or teaching school. They didn’t know.
But maybe I would be sussed out by the people who really, really knew. That I wasn’t rich mahogany or deep walnut or even hard and tested oak. That I was thin, plasticky, shitty veneer on eroding particle board.
Augustine brought light to that world. Kind of convinced me that maybe I wasn’t veneer.
He was a wispy character, tall, thin. He had this nasally posh British voice. I mean to just say it, I found the guy enchanting. He clearly knew his stuff and he exuded fashionista, whatever that actually means, but if you met him you would immediately know. He exuded that knowing cynicism. This guy had clearly been in the back rooms of Vogue. He had sat in the front row of runway shows. And so I took his words, his anecdotes, and owned some of them. Probably stole some of them and repeated them later.
What I remember thinking about Augustine is what part was he written for? Because he seemed so perfectly himself. There was a depth to his caricature that let you know this was not a man pretending. He was this thing that he was being. And I thought it was so cool.
Later in life, now, as I write, I often think, am I explaining to you? Or am I allowing you to feel it for yourself. The former is performative, the latter, well, it’s the better thing, that was this person.
I even bought a turtleneck. Felt right at the time. Put on a costume. Maybe I would be less veneer.
But here’s what I wonder now: Are we all just veneers? Are we all just particle board with plastic on top, ready to be peeled off and reskinned?
I want to be real wood. I think that’s my struggle. How do you know what species of wood you are? How do you sand it? How do you polish it? How do you oil it? How do you make it good?
Or am I meant to be petrified driftwood, hardened and weathered by a bunch of shit?
Augustine, he was real wood. I think. Or maybe he just had a better veneer than the rest of us.
Fast forward. Different city, different decade, same feeling.
I’m looking at my own reflection in a different kind of window now. Not Bond Street luxury but my laptop screen. LinkedIn profile. Oxford MBA. Founder. Former COO, Global Director. The professional veneer is better now, more expensive, more convincing.
But underneath?
I still wonder if I’m real wood.
It’s a specific kind of imposter syndrome. Not the performative kind people mention casually at conferences, the false humility that actually signals confidence. The real kind. The gnawing kind. The kind that asks: What if everything I’ve built is just increasingly sophisticated veneer on the same shitty particle board?
The veneer industry exists because real wood is expensive, and most people can’t tell the difference. A well-applied surface looks like solid wood. It functions like solid wood. It even ages like solid wood, if it’s real wood veneer, nicely matched, if you’re careful.
The only time you know for certain is when something heavy hits a corner and it cracks. When the edge chips. When something cuts deep enough to expose what’s underneath.
I’ve had those moments. We all have.
The question isn’t whether you’re veneer or solid wood. The question is whether the distinction matters as much as we think it does.
Maybe what’s underneath is just... more layers. All the way down.
But here’s the thing about particle board:
It’s compressed. It’s been through pressure. Heat. Force. It’s made of fragments that couldn’t hold together on their own, bonded under conditions that would splinter solid wood.
Solid wood has never been tested like that. It just grew that way.
I grew up in the true middle class, the kind that barely exists anymore. Government worker father, schoolteacher mother, ranch house, four bedrooms, nothing of poverty but nothing of estates and colonial manors either. I was not born into certainty. I was born into the in-between, and I’ve spent my whole life on the razor’s edge of it, oscillating between proximity to ruin and proximity to something that looks like success. I don’t know if the pressure that made me, the compression of all those fragments, produced something that can actually bear weight. But I’m still here.
Here’s what I’ve learned about veneer:
It’s not dishonesty. It’s adaptation. It’s what happens when you’re twenty-one and broke and standing outside windows you can’t enter, and you realize that if you want to get inside, you have to look like you belong there first.
And what happens when you’re forty-seven with an Oxford MBA on the wall and the particle board is still showing through? When the veneer is more sophisticated but you catch yourself, still, looking into windows you’re not sure you belong behind?
You realize you’re still on that razor’s edge. You’re still that kid on Bond Street.
The costume becomes the character. The performance becomes the person. The veneer grows into the wood.
Or it doesn’t.
And you spend the rest of your life wondering which one you are, or if the one you thought was better the whole time, actually is…
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