A Note On Credits.

We started One Hundred Muses on 8 August 2008. Neither of us imagined we'd still be writing about it eighteen years later.

A lot of things change in eighteen years. We've changed. The city has changed. The people who walked through SPKPlus at the beginning, then PlusMax Studios, then PG Creative Studios, are not the same people working in Cambodian fashion now. Some of them are running their own labels. Some of them are abroad. Some of them have passed away. We can name shoots from 2011 where we couldn't tell you what we had for breakfast that morning, but we can tell you who held the reflector. Who handed us the lens. Who steamed the dress. Who fetched the ice. Who stayed past midnight because we still hadn't gotten the frame.

This archive exists because of those people.

We need to say that clearly, because it's easy to lose. The credit line on a fashion photograph is a small line at the bottom of a page. Most of it gets cut. Photographer first. Designer next. Sometimes the muse. By the time the magazine prints, half the people who made the picture happen are not there in any visible form. We know this. We have watched it happen on our own work, in our own magazines, with our own contributors, for almost two decades.

We did not want to make another vanity portfolio. We did not want a coffee-table book with our names on the spine and everyone else credited in 6-point grey at the back. We wanted a place that remembers properly. A place where the person who handled the model's schedule for one show in 2014 has a profile of their own, with their own writing on it, with their own face. A place where the makeup assistant who did touch-ups on a chapter you've never heard of is named with the same weight as the designer of the collection. A place where, if we knew the driver's name, he would have a page too.

There is no bottom of the credit line here. That is what an archive is.

A hundred muses were photographed across the eighteen years of this work. Eighty-eight of their stories open on 8 August 2026. We are still writing the rest. We are still finding the people whose names we forgot to ask for properly the first time. We are still sending DMs to find the people from old shoots, asking who did this or that, trying to confirm a spelling. This is slow work. It should be slow.

Some of the people who shaped these pictures were our colleagues for a year and then disappeared from our lives. Some are still in the room with us every week. One we lost. Some we have only met once, on the afternoon of the shoot, never to be in touch again. All of them are in the archive. All of them get the same page. Because every one of those afternoons was real, and every one of those people was the reason the picture got made.

For us, the size of the role has never mattered. What matters is being seen on the day. Being remembered after. Being named when the work goes out. Because the people in the background, behind the scene, matter.

That is the whole of it.

Eighteen years late, we're trying to do this properly. Thank you, all of you, for the eighteen years.

Phnom Penh, 26 May 2026