Euphoria made Petra Collins and her aesthetic a household name.

Euphoria made Petra Collins and her aesthetic a household name. But how did she get there and what is she doing now? Welcome to Career Lore where we dig into the origin stories of the people shaping culture. Petra Collins grew up in Toronto and her dream was to be a professional ballerina, but after a career-ending injury, she ended up picking up a camera. At 17, she founded The Ardorous, an online collective for young female artists because she had no outlet for her work and decided to build one. She then became the resident photographer at Rookie and built a following on Tumblr posting 35mm portraits that were intimate and made teenage girls feel seen. In 2013, she moved to New York with a suitcase and $500. That year she had two major controversies that made her viral, so she decided to write an essay about it and it became an even bigger cultural moment. She had officially gone from indie breakout star to well-known name in the industry. She directed Carly Rae Jepsen, then Gucci campaigns, then Selena Gomez's fetish. Her look was specific, pastel, shot on 35mm and intimate. Nobody was making images that looked quite like hers. Then HBO came calling. She moved to LA to develop what became Euphoria. Her account is, she built the entire world, the casting, the visual language, all of it, and was dropped last minute. The show launched looking exactly like her work. It made her aesthetic the dominant visual language of an era. This thing that she'd spent years developing became the water that everyone was swimming in. She said she had to actively change her style because it no longer felt like hers. But she kept moving. She directed Olivia Rodrigo's Good 4 U and Vampire, earned a Grammy nomination and became the go-to director for one of the biggest pop debuts of the decade. She's also shot Charli XCX for Skims, directed Rosalia's latest music video, shot campaigns for Miu Miu and mounted her first solo museum show in Seoul. Her latest project, Star, is a narrative photo book shot like a feature film in Tokyo. Most people wait until they're ready, but Petra Collins just started and that's exactly why no one else could catch up.