Mischa Anouk Smith

Mischa Anouk Smith is the News and Features Editor of Marie Claire UK, where she leads the section, commissioning and writing in-depth features on culture, politics, and the issues that impact and influence women’s lives.

Her work combines sharp cultural insight with rigorous reporting. From pop culture to politics — not to mention technology, work, fertility, relationships, money, and more — her features interrogate how structural forces shape women’s lives, translating complex issues into compelling, reader-focused storytelling.

Mischa’s aim is always to find the human stakes within big themes. In The Fertility Gold Rush — How Big Business Took Over Baby-Making, she explored falling birth rates not as social panic or personal failing, but as the result of economic pressure, workplace inequality, and the rise of fertility as big business. This investigation led to invitations to speak with the country’s Employment Secretary and appear on BBC Politics Live. Separately, she appeared on the BBC’s Woman’s Hour following an on-the-ground report on Trump’s second term and women’s subsequent activism burnout. For the fertility feature, Mischa was awarded Impact of the Year at the Future Awards, as well as an Editorial Excellence award. For her investigation into rape culture in primary schools, she was shortlisted for an End Violence Against Women award.

Alongside reported features, Mischa is interested in culturally driven storytelling; she moves between in-depth reports, cultural analysis, first-person essays, and op-eds that provide an outlet for her nosey-to-a-fault nature.

Before joining Marie Claire UK, Mischa worked as a freelance journalist covering everything from the post-pandemic beauty boom for Riposte, the oftentimes confusing relationship between therapists and their clients for Stylist, and what it feels like to join “Generation Boomerang” for Refinery29, where she wrote several first-person essays examining life as a millennial woman. Unafraid to explore the niche corners of life, both online and irl, she has written about the rise of AI girlfriends (and AI bands), how on-screen occultism bolstered the patriarchy for Dazed, rediscovering The Truman Show in the age of Main Character Syndrome for Far Out, and dissociative disorders — before it became a White Lotus meme — for Polyester.

Mischa’s career began in fashion journalism, where she interviewed designers including Dries Van Noten, Stine Goya, and Rosetta Getty, as well as celebrities like Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and Penélope Cruz, as Womenswear Editor of Harvey Nichols; a role that spanned both online and print.

As Brand Editor of Scandi fashion label GANNI, she edited the podcast GANNI Talks and the brand's debut book GANNI Gimme More, which featured essays from writers including Susie Lau and Marjon Carlos.

Mischa has delivered lectures on fashion history and digital cultures at the University of the Arts London and the University for the Creative Arts, and in 2016, she led a three-week Lifestyle Journalism short course at UAL's London College of Communication.

Mischa lives in Hackney with her film-poster-designer partner in a flat that is far too small, but which is set to be featured in an upcoming coffee table book about the city’s renters; a state she fears she is destined to remain in forever, like a true millennial cliché (though she baulks at any mention of avocado toast). Find out just how small that flat is by following her on Instagram.