Hi, I'm Anouk!
I’m a model with a background in fitness, film, theatre and media.
My interests move between sports and art and culture in both their grander and more ordinary forms: classical music and cinema, fashion, the internet, and the people who make, consume and gather around all of it.
I’m endlessly curious about how stories are told, and the very human details that tend to stay with me long after.
THE BOXING EDIT
On the thing that taught me how to throw a punch - and accidentally gave me a community.
Muay Thai was never supposed to become such a large part of my life.
Or perhaps it was. It is difficult to tell these things in hindsight. At some point, training turned into coaching, coaching turned into a business, and somewhere along the way, I found myself surrounded by women who had come for entirely different reasons but had all decided to stay.
The first version of what would eventually become The Girls Club existed in a park during COVID. There were no proper facilities, no grand opening and certainly no carefully considered business plan. Just a few women, some pads and enough space to move around.
At the time, I had no idea where it would lead. The sessions grew, and eventually so did the idea behind them. I opened a gym, built a business around it and watched something that had started with a few women training in a park become a much larger part of my life.
The Girls Club grew from there.
Eventually, that chapter changed shape. I stepped away from owning the gym, though I never stepped away from teaching. The Girls Club is still very much part of my life, but I found myself with more room to pay attention to the other interests that had been quietly waiting in the wings.
Film, fashion, media, culture. The things I had kept meaning to explore properly while I was busy building something else.
Meanwhile, The Girls Club continued to change too.
Somewhere along the way, some of the women became mothers. These days, I teach a weekly class where mothers bring their babies. I find myself wondering what that experience will mean to the little ones growing up around it. They are being introduced to Muay Thai before they're old enough to throw a punch themselves, watching their mothers train from the side.
Maybe they won't remember any of it. Or maybe they'll grow up with the quiet understanding that this was simply part of life: their mom went to Muay Thai, put on her gloves, took up space, and they came along.
It wasn't exactly the version of Muay Thai I imagined when I first started training. But it's precisely what I'm proud of.
I've built my own version of what Muay Thai can look like. One where women can train seriously without wanting to become fighters and where the sport feels accessible to people who might otherwise never have stepped foot in a fighting gym. A version of Muay Thai that can exist alongside the many different lives women are already living.
And a slightly controversial opinion in Muay Thai circles: I don't think you need to have been a fighter to be a good coach, either.
Looking back, I probably learned more about people from building The Girls Club than I realized at the time. Women came for Muay Thai and stayed for all sorts of reasons. Somewhere between the combinations, conversations, occasional outfit commentary and, eventually, babies growing up around the edges of class, strangers became familiar, and familiar people became a community.