It’s been close to three years since Lifestyle Asia last spoke with Athina Kamarudin—and the woman sitting before me, donning various pieces from the Clash de Cartier collection, is not the same Athina from way back when. She sits a little bit taller. Her smile is wide open, much more confident; she is surer of herself.
On Athina, the Clash de Cartier is at once bold and arresting. The collection is a blend of punk aesthetic and the Maison’s own classic, refined style. Beads and studs form a singular mesh for this signature jewellery collection, and against the Baignoire watch as well as the Love collection, it gives off a certain kind of elegance and timelessness. It’s chaos, it’s a cluster; it’s a dance.
Back in 2023, Athina had only begun professionally embarking on her modelling journey that same year, after a decade of dedicating herself to dance. “I don’t dance as much anymore, but I’d love to get back to it,” she’d told me then. And 2026 is the year she is turning the tables for herself.
“Every year, I think of wanting to go back to dance,” Athina expresses to me. “I just feel like I’ve never had the opportunity or time. I’m thinking, ‘Okay, maybe I need to prioritise my work.’ You know, things like that. But then if dance is so important to me, why is it not on my top three of my priority list? So, this year, I kind of understood that a little better.” This April, Athina is set to participate in an international dance festival in Uzbekistan, something she only just got wind of the day before our cover shoot. “I was like, ‘Damn, I haven’t danced in a long time.’ And dancing in a whole other country is going to be another thing. But then I had a talk with my mom and my partner, kind of walking through the idea of it. And I realised that the reason why I never went back to dancing was because I always talked myself out of it. I felt like I was not good enough.”
That feeling has held Athina back from pursuing many things she’d thought about in her early twenties. But in the past year alone, she’s spent a lot of time reflecting on herself and rediscovering her first loves (like music, and dancing) and shedding parts of herself when it felt necessary. “There were so many things that I wanted to do, but I was always shying away from it,” Athina muses. “Or I wanted to wait for the right time. And then I realised I just have to do it anyway. No one’s going to wait for me. Like, I’m getting older by the year. I have this little problem with myself where I need to be perfect before I do something. But the longer I wait to be perfect, the more I’ll miss out my ‘window’ of doing those things.”
One of those things that Athina has finally pursued is DJ-ing. She’s meddled with the idea of spinning music and playing the beat, and officially took it up late last year. “I’ve always been into music,” she tells me when I ask how it all started. “I grew up in a very musically-inclined family. I danced, and my brothers are singers. So, music has always been the ‘talk’ of my house. And last year, I started having more friends who are in the music industry, specifically the DJ-ing industry. One of my friends—who has now become a very close friend of mine—came up to me one day and was like, ‘You know, since you dance, I think you can be a DJ.’ And I was like, ‘What gave you the confidence that I can do it?’ He said it was the things like counting, timing, you know?”
Her decade-long background in dance gave her a sharp sense of rhythm; a skill that would have otherwise been difficult to hone from scratch. That made her an easy student. “I was like, ‘Okay, I’ll take five classes with you.’ That’s what I said. But by the second class, I was already enjoying myself so much. I found myself practicing at home, I was looking up YouTube videos on the technicality of it, all that stuff. And then I just practised, practised, practised. Until I felt like, okay, it was good enough for me to kind of showcase my talent out to the world. And so I did.”
Athina’s first-ever official DJ gig was at Lifestyle Asia’s LSA100 party just last December. Before, she’d only deejayed at lounges and nightclubs at most. “I was actually really nervous leading up to that,” she admits now, giggling. “I was practising, like, non-stop.” But her set was a huge success. It was the first time in the history of Lifestyle Asia’s parties where our guests were actively refusing to leave, even as the lights came back on. It had been close to 1AM by then, and the crowd kept demanding more songs. “I was looking down at my manager and I was just like, ‘Do I continue?’ And he went, ‘Yeah, keep going. People love it!’”
The guests in question were made up of people Athina herself knew—mostly her friends in the industry, her peers; people she’d met in passing. For some reason, that had made it all the more nerve-wracking for her. But by midnight she could tell that she’d pulled through wonderfully. “That was enough motivation for me to keep going, you know?” Athina recounts. “I don’t need it to be perfect, or that I play the right songs at the right time. As long as people are having fun and I can feed off of that energy, I think it’s good enough.”
I’ve seen a lot of opinions thrown around about Gen Z, or Zoomers, as they’re called—some I agree with, some I want to argue against—but I respect them for how deeply self-aware they are, and how they continue to prioritise their own mental health and personal boundaries over the traditional way of thinking. Some might call it self-centred, but I see it as of challenging the norm. Zoomers hate being told how they should do things. And why wouldn’t they? Look at how well that turned out for some of us millennials.
This is currently where Athina is at with modelling. Now three years into the industry, she has seen a lot and been through much more, and she has often questioned the role that was so quickly thrust upon her at the start of it all. “I feel like when I first started, I was fighting the idea of being categorised as a plus-size model,” she opens up. “I think that was a really big hurdle for me. Every time I was categorised as that, it kind of ate me up inside because I knew for a fact that I was not.”
The disillusionment had hit her pretty hard. Here she was, barely 25 and so eager to dive into the fashion world. She was, as she puts it, “so hungry for knowledge”, hungry for the experience and exposure, that she wanted to try everything—and she was boxed in before she could get the chance to discover herself. “I couldn’t break out of that, and I felt like I was hitting the ceiling a little bit,” Athina adds. “Like, where would I go from there? There was a part of me that really wanted to become a model who would have more experiences to talk about. But how big was this ‘diversity’ thing that was going on in the industry? Now, when I look back at it, I’m really thankful for all that I’ve done before. It led me to be able to do what I do now. But I’m a bit more aware of where I stand. I don’t let people’s words affect me like that. I create a category for myself, when and where I can.”
As Athina is telling me this, I bring up another Zoomer who had recently made the headlines for her iconic comeback: figure skater Alysa Liu, who’d come out of retirement and won the Olympic gold medal this year. And she’d done it all on her own terms, making sure that she would have final say over everything, whether it was her costumes or her music, and even her diet and training schedules. “If you give that autonomy to people, they’re able to do it themselves,” Athina says as we marvel over Alysa Liu’s impact on the young generation. “I think we forget that people have passion and dreams. That no matter what you put in front of them, if they really want it, they’ll get it. They’ll work their way towards that. And we need to be more aware of that.”
On modelling and fashion, Athina is in the midst of realigning with what works for her, and she’s setting the record straight: “When people tell me they want to hire me as a plus-size model, I correct them and say, ‘I’m not a plus-size model. I don’t wear this specific size. If anything, you can call me a mid-size model.’ I feel like the thing with ‘plus-size’ that’s a bit controversial is that we’re not talking about the health side of it. And we should be. Because I’ve always been a very healthy person in terms of, like, working out. I was an athlete in an athlete’s body. But being categorised by people who never walked in my shoes was actually quite demeaning. So what I’ve learned from myself, especially as a model in the industry, is that I redefine who I am myself. I don’t need to hear it from anybody else.”
Still, as a Zoomer whose job is extremely online, Athina has learned to muddle through the noise. When she first started out as a content creator, she was big on self-expression. And she still is—but with a lot more understanding, and a tighter grasp on it all. “Three years ago when I was telling everybody that I want to vouch for vulnerability, to keep talking about it and be honest online, there was still a part of me that felt like it was a little bit of a weakness,” she shares. “You know, showing people that I cry, or that I’m human. And even if that idea of weakness doesn’t come from me, it felt like everybody around me still felt that about me. Something like, ‘As authentic as she is, she cries, and that equates to being weak.’ But what I’ve learned now, three years later, is that it was never a sign of weakness. If anything, it was always a sign of strength. It was a sign that I could be flat on the ground and still pick myself back up.”
This is something that Athina has always wanted to convey through her content—authenticity; the raw parts of herself that not everybody feels comfortable showing to the world. And it makes you do exactly what it should: pause for a moment, and reflect on your own feelings. “I have this really strong feeling these days that the world is moving way too fast,” she adds. “Everybody is grabbing everything they can, then moving out of the way, and I feel like there’s not a lot of space for people, you know? We just need to slow it down. And if having feelings is slowing it down, then I’m okay with it. There’s this sentence I wrote everywhere, in my book, my journal, my iPad. You have to sit with it. Your emotions, your feelings, your sadness, your madness. You have to learn to sit with it, and to be okay with it. Because it’s a part of who you are in your journey of learning and unlearning.”
editor-in-chief & creative direction MARTIN TEO | interview PUTERI YASMIN SURAYA | photography EDMUND LEE | videography JACKIE MAH | hair styling CODY CHUA | makeup artist KEVIN LEE | styled by AZZA ARIF | wardrobe ALIA BASTAMAM, COS, SYOMIRIZWA GUPTA | jewellery CARTIER
Find out more about ATHINA KAMARUDIN in the latest issue of LSA Digital Cover Vol. 043 HERE.
Note : The information in this article is accurate as of the date of publication.
